Slider nodded unemphatically at this remarkable philosophy. ‘Do you think Miss Austen was on the look-out for a husband?’
‘Well they all are underneath, aren’t they? Mind you, she didn’t particularly show it in those days, not like later. She was
pretty chipper, and it was all quite light-hearted. We had a lot of fun, and no hard feelings on either side when we parted.’
‘She struck you as being happy – contented with life?’
‘Oh yes. She’d got her own place, and she’d just bought a car, and I think she was enjoying being away from home and having
her freedom. I don’t think she’d been happy as a child.’
‘Did she talk to you about her childhood?’
‘Not in detail, but I gathered she was an orphan, and she’d been brought up by an aunt who hated her and wanted her out of
the way. Am I telling you things you already know?’
‘I’d like to have your impressions,’ Slider said. ‘It all helps to build up the picture. Did she tell you why the aunt hated
her?’
‘Personality clash, I think,’ he said vaguely. ‘She was always being shoved out of the way, sent to boarding school and so
on. And apparently the aunt kept her short of money while she was at college, even though she was pretty well-off – the aunt,
I mean.’
‘Did Miss Austen ever intimate to you that she might have expectations? A legacy or something of that sort?’
He watched Cutts under his eyebrows for some reaction, but the other man only smiled to himself.
‘Expectations. Nice old-fashioned expression. No, she never said anything of that sort. But she did live in a pretty swanky
flat, so perhaps she had come into some money. Or it might have belonged to the aunt, I suppose. It wasn’t like a young person’s
flat, now I come to think of it.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It was one of those luxury service flats, you know, with a porter in the hall and everything laid on. More the kind of place
you’d expect to find rich old ladies with Pekineses. And it struck me -’
He stopped, as if it had only just struck him. Slider made a helpfully interrogative sound.
‘Well,’ Martin Cutts went on, ‘it never struck me as being very cosy or homelike. There was never anything lying around. It
didn’t look as though anyone lived there – it was more like one of those company flats, where all the furniture and decorations
have been done by a firm. Everything coordinated, like a luxury hotel. Awful, really.’
Slider thought of the shabby bedsitter and then, involuntarily, of the bare council flat, and the anomaly threatened to overload
the circuits. He needed to move on, to let the subconscious get to work on it.
‘After you left Birmingham, did you keep in touch with each other?’
‘Oh no,’ said Cutts, and the words ‘of course not’ hung on the air.
‘As far as you were concerned, you never expected to see her again?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d married my present wife, you see, and Anne-Marie and I were only ever a bit of fun. She understood that
all right.’
But did she, Slider thought. He considered her childhood, the impersonal luxury flat, the desperate attempt to persuade Simon
Thompson to marry her, the number of people who had said ‘I didn’t really know her’. No-one, he thought, had ever wanted her.
She had never been more than used and rejected, and Joanna, casual and incurious, was the nearest that poor child had ever
had to a friend. The loneliness of her life and death appalled him. He wanted to shake this self-satisfied rat by the neck,
and hoped for a whole new set of reasons that he had never been in Joanna’s bed.
‘But when she joined your present orchestra, you took up with her again?’ he managed to say evenly.
‘Oh, it wasn’t really like that. We were friendly, of course, and I think we may have gone to bed a couple of times, but there
was nothing between us. She was perfectly all right until she had this bust-up with Simon Thompson.’
‘And what happened then?’
He looked away. ‘She – approached me.’
‘Why do you think she did that?’
‘Shoulder to cry on, I suppose.’ The eyes returned. ‘She really was cut up about it, poor kid. She said Simon had proposed
marriage to her, and then backed out. I didn’t believe that – I mean Simon may be a prize pratt, but he isn’t stupid – but
she evidently believed it, so it was all the same as far as she was concerned.’
‘What form did this “approach” take?’
‘She asked me to go for a drink with her after a concert one night, and when we’d had a couple, she asked me back to her flat.’
‘And you went to bed with her?’ Slider concealed his fury, he thought, very well.
‘Yes. But I don’t think it was me she really wanted. Her heart didn’t really seem in it. I suppose she was still hankering
after Simon.’
‘Was it just the one occasion?’
‘No, a few times. I can’t remember – four or five perhaps.’
‘And when was the last time?’
‘Just before Christmas. After our last date – the Orchestra’s last date, I mean – before the Christmas break.’
Slider nodded. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Martin Cutts looked helpless, as if he didn’t know what he was being asked. ‘We had a few drinks, and went back to her flat.
Like before.’
‘And went to bed together?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did she seem to you? Happy? Sad? Worried?’
‘Depressed, I’d say. Well, she was worried, for a start, because she’d lost her diary. That may sound silly to you, but it’s
a major disaster for a musician. And she was worried that Simon was going to make trouble for her in the Orchestra -that phone-call
business. Do you know about that? Oh, right. But there was more than that.’ He paused, evidently marshalling his thoughts.
His eyes were a very bright blue, but small and rather round, which made him look more than ever like a bird with its head
on one side. ‘After we’d made love, she started to cry, and went on about how nobody cared about her, and that she hadn’t
got a boyfriend and so on. I was a bit pissed off about that – I mean, nobody likes being wept over – so I tried to jolly
her up a bit, and then I thought I’d slope off. But when I tried to get up, she clung to me, and started really crying, and
saying she was frightened.’
‘Frightened? Of what?’
‘She didn’t say. She just kept saying “I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid” over and over, just like that. And sobbing fit to choke.
Got herself really worked up.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘Well, what could I do? I held her and patted her a bit, and when she quietened down, I made love to her again, just to cheer
her up.’
‘I see,’ Slider said remotely.
Martin Cutts eyed him unhappily. ‘What could I do?’ he said again. ‘People on their own do get depressed around Christmas.
It’s not nice being on your own when everyone else is with their families, but I couldn’t take her home with me, could I?
And she wouldn’t go back to her aunt. I felt rotten leaving her, but I had to get home.’
‘How was she when you left her?’
‘Quiet, she wasn’t crying any more, but she seemed very depressed. She said something like “I can’t go on any longer”. I said
of course you can, don’t be silly, and she said,
“No, it’s all over for me”.’
‘Were those her actual words?’
‘I think so. Yes. Well, you can imagine how I felt, leaving her like that. But then, when we met again in January, she seemed
to be all right again – quiet, you know, as if she’d resigned herself. Then when I heard she was dead, I naturally thought
she must have killed herself, and I felt terrible all over again. But she didn’t, did she?’
‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Slider acknowledged.
‘So there was nothing I could have done, was there?’ he appealed.
Slider had no wish to let him off the hook of responsibility, since what he had done must have added to Anne-Marie’s overall
misery, but he could hardly blame Cutts for her murder.
Quiet,
he thought,
as if she’d resigned herself.
But to what? Had she foreseen her death? What had she done to bring it upon herself? Perhaps, lonely and unwanted as she
was, she had really ceased to care if she lived or died – until, of course, that last moment in the car park when the realisation
had come upon her (how?) that it was going to happen, and she made the one last futile effort to escape, one last pathetic
flutter of a bird in a trap.
Joanna came in cautiously, pink and scented, and looked from one to the other. ‘The voices had stopped, so I thought you’d
finished.’
Slider roused himself. ‘Yes, we’ve finished. For the moment, anyway. Thank you, Mr Cutts.’
‘Mr Cutts?’ Joanna said in ribald derision. ‘Mr
Cutts.’
And Cutts reached out a hand and grabbed her by the neck, pulling her against his chest in an affectionate death-lock. It
was not a lover’s gesture, but it was the more disturbing for that, for Slider could easily imagine what depths of intimacy
might have preceded such casual manhandling.
‘Don’t chance your arm, woman,’ Cutts said, grinning, and when he released her she slipped an arm round his waist and gave
him a brief, hard hug.
Catching Slider’s eye she said, almost apologetically, ‘Martin and I are old friends, you know.’
Cutts smiled at Slider disarmingly. ‘Yeah, Jo and I go back
a long way. I hope you’re taking good care of her – she’s a remarkable woman.’
This, Slider knew, was where he was supposed to smirk and say something complacent along the lines of
she certainly is
or
I’m a lucky man,
thus accepting gracefully the implied compliment that Cutts knew that he was Joanna’s lover and was assuring him that he
had no rival here. But Slider’s feelings were too new and unfamiliar to him, and above all too large and too overwhelmingly
important for such social backgammon. He could do no more than mutter something stiff and graceless, and feel a fool, and
angry. Joanna gave him a thoughtful look, and led Martin Cutts away to show him out, leaving Slider alone to regain his composure.
Accustomed to marital warfare, he expected her to reenter the room with a rebuke, and made sure he got his blow in first.
‘You certainly know some really lovely people. Are they all like him in your business, or is he better than most?’
She stood before him, looking at him without hostility. In fact, there was even a smile lurking under the surface.
‘Oh, Martin’s not too bad a bloke, if you don’t take him seriously. He’s like a greedy child let loose in a sweetshop, except
that his lollies are women’s bodies. He has to prove himself all the time.’ She put her arms round Slider’s unyielding neck,
and her breasts nudged him like two fat, friendly puppies. ‘And you know, about fifty per cent of all men would behave exactly
like him, given his opportunities. Why do so few men ever grow up? It’s depressing.’
She laid her mouth against his, waiting for him to react, but he struggled with his resentment and would not kiss her back.
She drew her head back to look at him enquiringly. ‘What are you so mad about?’
It was hovering on his lips to demand whether that man had been her lover, but he saw in time the amusement lurking in her
dark eyes and knew that she was just waiting for him to ask. He thrust the thought away. It was of no interest to him, he
told himself sternly.
She followed his struggles, recorded minutely in his expression, ‘You’re quite right,’ she said. ‘It’s impossible to be jealous
of someone like Martin. He isn’t real. He’s a sort
of sexual Yogi Bear, always snitching picnic baskets, and being chased by Mister Ranger.’
Slider began to laugh, his resentment dissolving. ‘I don’t deserve you,’ he said.
‘Of course you don’t,’ she assured him. ‘I’m a remarkable woman.’
‘Are you sure Atherton won’t mind?’ Joanna said as they sped northwards through the blissfully empty streets. It was another
clear, sunny day, but there was a small and bitter wind much more in keeping with the bare trees. Joanna was wearing an overlarge
and densely woolly white jacket, so that with her dark eyes and pale face she looked like a small, stout polar bear. Slider
glanced sideways at her with affection, thinking how natural it seemed already to have her beside him in the car.
‘Of course he won’t. Why should he?’
‘I can think of lots of reasons. For a start, he may not have enough food for three if he was expecting to feed two. And for
another, he might want to have you to himself.’
‘He’s my sergeant, not my wife. Anyway, if we’re going to go over the case, we need you there. You were the person closest
to Anne-Marie.’
‘That sounds perilously thin to me, and I’m not even a detective. He’s bound to see through it.’
‘He’s my friend as well as my partner. And I need you.’
‘Ah well, there’s no answer to that, is there? Do I call him Atherton as well? Or should I make an attempt at Jim?’
Atherton’s face, when he opened the door, was carefully schooled to show nothing of his feelings either of annoyance or surprise,
and he invited them in politely. Joanna eyed him, unconvinced.
‘I hope you don’t mind too much having me here? It was terribly short notice, I know, with no shops open. You don’t
have to feed me, if there isn’t enough.’
‘There’s enough,’ he said economically. ‘Go on in, take your coats off.’
Slider glanced at him defensively, and followed Joanna in under Atherton’s door-holding arm. The front door opened directly
onto the living-room, a haven of deep armchairs, crammed bookshelves, and a real fire leaping energetically in the grate and
reflecting cheerfully in the brass scuttle.
‘Oh, what a gorgeous room!’ Joanna said at once. She turned to Atherton an innocent face, ‘I had an elderly aunt once who
lived in an artesian cottage, and it wasn’t a bit like this.’
Atherton walked into it. ‘You mean artisan cottage,’ he said, his eyebrows alone deploring her ignorance.
‘Oh no,’ she said gravely, ‘it was very damp.’
There was a brief silence during which Slider watched Atherton anxiously, knowing he was proud, and more accustomed to using
Slider as his straight man than being one himself. But an uncontrollable smirk began to tug at his lips, and after a moment
he gave in to it and grinned along with Joanna.