The Chief Inspector's Daughter (24 page)

She stopped in the doorway of a shop and looked about her. She was near the centre of the town in White Hart Street, the narrow shopping street that had been made into a pedestrian precinct. The shop windows were lighted but the street was dead, apart from one woman in furry hat, calf-length coat and trousers, exercising her dog and fondly encouraging it to foul the pavement.

Alison rubbed her blurred eyes and tried to decide where to go. She knew a good many people in Breckham Market, school friends and the families of school friends, and friends of her own family, but there was no one she could turn to for refuge; no one who would be sympathetic enough to understand her, to accommodate her without question and to allow her to stay without revealing her whereabouts to her parents. She had enough money with her to pay for a night at the Rights of Man, the Georgian-fronted coaching inn turned modern hotel on the corner of the market place and White Hart Street, but her father would soon find her there. Wherever she went in Breckham, he would be bound to find her.

It was nearing 9.30 – too late, she knew, in that small town, for either trains or buses. And she had heard enough from her father to make her afraid of trying to hitch a lift. She could neither stay in Breckham Market nor leave it. A feeling of desolation, of loneliness of spirit, seemed to creep up her body from the cold paving stones, contracting her heart into a hard, tight lump that rose and lodged itself in her throat, threatening to choke her.

The woman in the hat disappeared round a corner, although her poodle insisted on lingering at the end of its lead to give a shop front a parting salute. And then the quietness of White Hart Street was broken by a group of youths, shouting and pushing and shoving at each other as they made their way to the next pub on their itinerary. Alison stepped back into the doorway as they passed but one of them, stopping to light a cigarette, saw her.

‘'Allo, darling,' he said, identifying himself by his accent as one of the metropolitan immigrants to Suffolk. ‘Waiting for me, are you?' He moved closer to her. He was about her own age, tall and thin, wearing a red and blue plaid bomber jacket. His hair hung lank about his face and there was a pustule at one side of his mouth; he smelled beery and imperfectly washed.

Alison found an approximation of her normal voice. ‘I'm waiting for my boy-friend,' she asserted.

‘Oh yeh?' He looked round at the street, empty except for his own friends who had scuffled on. ‘Don't look as though he's coming, does it?' He leaned forward and put one hand up against the shop door, blocking her way.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘of course he's coming.' She tried not to sound nervous; ridiculous that she should have spent eighteen months in London without a single encounter of this kind, only to be cornered in her own home town.

His friends, further up the street, began to shout for him: ‘Come on, Keef.'

‘Piss off,' bawled Keith over his shoulder, ‘I'm busy.' He grinned at Alison, putting out his other hand to touch her hair. ‘Big feller, this boy-friend of yours, is he? Bigger 'n me?' His hand moved down and made a grab at her breast.

‘Much bigger.' Alison swung her suitcase at him, ducked under his arm and ran. He clutched at his thigh, swore, and then limped menacingly after her. She made for a telephone call-box, half-way down the precinct, and stood in the neon-lit rain panting, one hand on the door.

‘Go away,' she said. ‘Leave me alone or I'll – I'll call the police.'

‘Oh yeh?' He approached slowly, rubbing his thigh. ‘Not from there you won't, darling. Fixed that'phone meself, not more than an hour ago, didn't I? Must've expected somefing like this. Whatcher going to do now, then, eh?'

Whether it was his work or not, he was right. Alison could see, from where she stood, that the receiver had been wrenched away from the set.

Her mouth felt dry. ‘I'll – I'll scream,' she threatened, backing away, hoping that he would believe her. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself, to be questioned by helpful citizens – if there were any within earshot – and then to be returned ignominiously to her home and her mother's fussing and her father's interrogation.

‘Yeh? Well, I might just give you somefing to scream for,' he said. He made several obscene suggestions. ‘You could've damaged me, doing what you did. Really damaged me. You want teaching a lesson, that's what you want.'

Alison turned, dodged round a plane tree, almost slipped on the sloping wet cobble-stones that had been set at its base as an additional decorative feature, and ran in the direction of the market place, her suitcase bumping against her leg. She heard the thud of following feet and almost panicked; but then the dignified brick façade of the Rights of Man rose above her, and she slipped thankfully through the doors and into the empty brightly lit foyer.

The receptionist, a cool divorcée who, in common with many hotel staff, considered herself underpaid, badly fed and generally put-upon, was busy with some typing. She had more than enough work to do, and did not invite idle enquiries and interruptions by looking up every time the doors opened. She was telling the truth when she told the policeman who came round later that evening with a photograph of Alison that she had not seen the girl.

Alison had visited the hotel the previous year for a friend's wedding reception, and so she had some idea of its layout. She went straight to the corridor where the public telephone was, and looked up a number in the local directory. Her fingers trembled as they riffled the pages. She felt shaken and sickened by her unpleasant encounter, but at least it had served a purpose. It had reminded her of one person she could turn to, one woman who would give her unquestioning support and refuge.

It was only last week that she had heard Roz Elliott telling Jasmine Woods about the latest women's movement campaign. We need to reclaim the night, Roz had insisted; to make it safe for women to walk through the streets after dark without fear – fear not only of mugging and rape, but of the kind of sexist domination that Alison had just experienced.

They had argued about it, of course. Jasmine and Roz always argued. Roz believed in national action, although she was usually too much involved with academic and political work in Yarchester to be able to take an active part herself. It was important, she thought, for women to demonstrate their togetherness by gathering in city areas notorious for sexual assault and sexist affront – London's Soho especially, because of its strip clubs and porn shops. Once gathered, the women could set about reclaiming the streets by walking proudly through them with feminist banners and songs.

Jasmine had argued not about the need to alter men's attitudes towards women, and to reclaim the night, but about the method. Gatherings and marches invited confrontations, she had said. Men would jeer, scuffles would start, the police would move in, tempers would give, arrests would be made, violence would erupt. And violent encounters between men and women was precisely what the feminists wanted to end, wasn't it?

One thing was certain, Alison thought as she dialled the Old Rectory number: Roz would never undermine her independence by revealing her whereabouts to her father.

The telephone was answered by Mandy, Roz's pregnant lame duck. ‘Oh, Alison – how are you? Wasn't it awful about … what? No, sorry, Roz isn't here, she's staying overnight at her flat in Yarchester. The number's 25387. Look, Claire and I were shattered to hear about Jasmine. She was always so nice to us. You must feel absolutely—'

Alison thanked her for her information and dropped the receiver clumsily back on to its rest. Mandy was right, she did feel absolutely. She had hoped, if Roz were at home, to be collected from Breckham and taken to Thirling, since it was only a matter of four miles away. But she could hardly expect Roz to drive the seventeen miles from Yarchester to pick her up.

She felt absolutely defeated. If she stayed in the hotel her father would find her, if she stepped outside the odious Keith might be waiting.

And then she saw, pinned on to the information board beside the telephone, a card advertising the local taxi firm. She could not make use of it, because she knew that her father knew the proprietor. But also pinned to the board was a hand-written card advertising a private car-hire service.

As soon as she reached Yarchester, Alison telephoned Roz Elliott. She hardly knew what to say, but Roz's response was immediate: Alison was to stay exactly where she was, and Roz would pick her up.

It was not until Alison had put the receiver down that it occurred to her that she might have rung at a very inconvenient time. She was not sure whether a liberated marriage, like the Elliotts', involved adultery almost as a matter of principle; for all she knew, Roz shared her Yarchester flat with a man.

But if she did, he left no evidence. The flat consisted of a small but well-furnished bed-sitting room with a kitchen and a bathroom, in a modern block near the university. The main room housed a considerable quantity of reading matter: sociological text books and periodicals, and a daunting variety of feminist magazines that Alison had never heard of. The room was dominated by a women's liberation movement wall poster.

Roz Elliott, big and handsome and careless of her appearance, brought two mugs of coffee from the kitchen. Her vigour and her voice were both subdued; she had said very little to Alison, when she picked her up in the centre of Yarchester, but her silence communicated such sympathy that Alison found it easy to tell her everything that had happened, from the time when she had arrived at Yeoman's that morning.

Roz listened, smoked and sipped coffee. ‘What are you going to do now?' she asked. ‘I don't mean tonight, that's no problem – I can lend you a sleeping-bag. But I'm speaking at a women's conference in Birmingham tomorrow, and I can't very well leave you here. Not that I mind, you understand; you're welcome to stay, but you asked Mandy where to find me and so sooner or later someone will come here looking for you. Whatever else the police are, they're not thick.'

She remembered Alison's father's profession and smiled an apology. ‘You know what I mean.'

Alison nodded. ‘There are times when I hate policemen – detectives especially. I hate the way their minds work. Oh, I'm fond of Dad, he can be a real old softy; and he usually tries to be fair. But when he's on a case he'll trample on anyone's feelings, even his family's.' She thought about it. ‘Mostly his family's,' she added bitterly, on her mother's behalf as well as her own.

Roz Elliott frowned, brushing at her thick fringe with her fingers. ‘I tell you where you could go, just for a few days, while you make up your mind about what you're going to do next. My sister Polly lives in a farmhouse about twenty miles away, in the other direction from Breckham Market so you should be safe from any police visits. It's a sort of commune. I'm not into that kind of squalor myself, but you might find it bearable for a short time. And Polly's a dear, you'll like her, everyone does. Good. I'll take you there first thing tomorrow morning.'

They went to bed, Roz Elliott on her divan and Alison in a sleeping-bag spread against a wall. ‘Feeling better?' Roz asked her from across the darkened room.

‘Yes, thanks.' Alison, who had begun to feel weepy again, blew her nose. ‘It helps to talk.'

‘Yes.' The duvet made a billowing noise as Roz's big body turned over. ‘That goes for me, too.' She paused, and then said, ‘I was very fond of Jasmine, you know. It was mutual – you might not have thought it, from the way we argued, but we were very good friends.'

‘I realized that. You wouldn't have dropped in so often, otherwise.'

‘We enjoyed arguing.' Roz Elliott's voice smiled in the dark. ‘We did disagree fundamentally about a lot of things, but to some extent our arguments were just an exercise, a game. And it was a game we particularly enjoyed playing in front of other people. Jasmine and I understood each other; we'd called each other's bluff long ago.'

Alison propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Bluff?'

‘Yes. You see, we were both, in a sense, public people. We were committed to certain attitudes, Jasmine as a romantic writer, me as a militant feminist. We both wore the appropriate public faces. But in private we both had reservations about our roles, and we understood each other's reservations.'

‘What sort of reservations?'

There was another pause. ‘Well, take me,' said Roz. ‘Only don't for God's sake point this out to any of my supporters, or I'll lose all my credibility. I'm known as an enthusiast for women's liberation: I believe passionately in equality of opportunity for women, and in every woman's right to live as an individual without being forced to play the conventional, supportive, wifely role. I go to meetings all over the country proclaiming these beliefs, and I write articles and books; and I take political action by lobbying Members of Parliament and by encouraging women to band together and join trade unions to fight for their rights.

‘But as Jasmine once pointed out to me, I'm a terrible fraud. I've never had to fight for anything. I come from a happy and secure middle-class background, and I was always encouraged to achieve whatever I wanted in life. I've never met with any discrimination on account of being a woman; I'm doing the job I want to do, and I have a sufficiently large private income to allow me to choose whatever lifestyle I prefer. I have something that the vast majority of women, for lack of money, can never have: the luxury of choice. And what have I chosen? Marriage, and not just two but three children!'

‘Oh, but yours is a very unusual sort of married life, isn't it?' said Alison.

‘Yes, in that I happen to have married an understanding man, and that we're an articulate and reasonably affluent couple. This kind of marriage suits both of us. We love each other, we love our children, and we wouldn't want any other kind of life. So I, the militant feminist, could be described – though I'd flay any journalist who dared to do so – as a happily married mother of three. Whereas Jasmine, the romantic novelist, disliked her experience of married life and simply wasn't interested in children. She was the one who embraced the principle of liberation, and found a very satisfactory alternative to marriage and a family.'