Authors: Joan Smith
“Yes please.”
“Can you wait for food till I get back? I can pick up a Chinese takeaway.”
“Chinese sounds great.”
Entering the kitchen a few minutes later, Loretta was astonished to find the table covered in lined A4 paper. The kettle stood cold and empty, and there was no sign that Marilyn had availed herself of Loretta's offer to make tea.
“I made a few notes,” she said modestly, gesturing
towards her research, and began to read out some of the headings: “Active citizenship, what it means for women; an elected second chamber; reform of the monarchy; whether we should include reproductive rights; reform of the judiciaryâthat's your bit.”
Loretta winced, turning away so Marilyn couldn't see her face. She was hungry, desperately anxious about Bridget, and the prospect of spending the best part of the evening in the dreary Women's Institute building in Middle Way filled her with dismay. Seizing an apple from the fruit bowl and biting into it, she said indistinctly: “I'll just make some tea, I've got someone staying.” She filled the kettle and switched it on; then, not wanting to waste a minute, she ran upstairs to her study, where she began pulling books from the shelves, tossing them aside one by one as she conducted a frantic and largely unsuccessful search for inspiration for her speech.
Loretta Padded Downstairs Into The kitchen next morning, her head aching and her eyes screwed up against the brilliant white light reflected at her by the cupboard doors. She pulled open a drawer and pushed aside antihistamines, seasickness pills and a tube of Savlon, stared in surprise at a packet of hypoallergenic condoms which she couldn't remember buying, and finally located a strip of paracetamol tablets at the back. Swallowing the pills with the dregs of a carton of orange juice made her feel slightly sick, so she pulled out a chair and sat down, breathing in a curious amalgam of stale Chinese food and fresh coffee which made her feel worse. Foil containers covered the table, most of them nearly full and resembling an illustration in a cheap, garishly photographed cookery book. Next to her elbow slices of beef and green pepper curled up through congealed black-bean sauce; another tray, in which bean sprouts and an unidentifiable white vegetable cohabited in a glutinous mess, was virtually untouched.
“Yuk,” she said, wrinkling her nose, and began stuffing foil cartons into the white plastic bag supplied by the takeaway. When it was full she lifted the lid of the
swing bin and dropped it inside, hoping the various sticky liquids would not leak. It was only when she returned to the table to remove her empty plate that she noticed a note in Bridget's spiky handwriting, written on the back of an envelope and lying next to the warm coffee pot.
Loretta,
Sorry about last night. I meant to get up when you came in but I must have dropped off to sleep, those tablets are really powerful. Sorry about the food, I've left a tenner in the envelope to cover it. Also, I've borrowed your green jacket, I didn't think you'd mind. The inquest's at 10:30
Loretta glanced at her wrist but she was not wearing her watch.
and I'm meeting Sam at the coroner's court. J. Tracey's going to be there as well, he called last night just after you went out. So did your motherâdidn't sound important but she said could you ring her back. No other messagesâsee you later.
Much love, Bridget
Loretta peered into the envelope, saw a single ten-pound note, and lay back in her chair. She felt awful, a combination of too much to drink and indigestion, the result of eating immediately before going to bed and consuming a bottle of red wine as she did so. The meeting had dragged on till just before ten and she stopped at the Chinese in Walton Street on the way home, realizing belatedly as she walked through the door that she did not know whether to order food for Sam. The pay phone in
the takeaway was out of order so she had no choice but to buy enough for three, making a complete guess at what Bridget and Sam might like. This was a mistake, for she arrived to find the house in darkness; only the presence of the cat, stretched out against the spare-room door when she tiptoed upstairs, suggested that Bridget was inside and fast asleep. She opened the door quietly, restraining the cat with her other hand, and heard Bridget's even breathing; too tired to consider whether she was acting from consideration or cowardice, she left her to sleep and tiptoed back down the stairs to the kitchen, where an absurdly large Chinese feast awaited her.
Loretta yawned and put her hand up to cover her mouth, then moved zombielike to answer the phone.
“Mmm?” she yawned.
“Dr. Bennett?”
“No, sorry.”
“Is she there? Or would I get her at St. Frideswide's? I
think
we have the number in our files.”
“No, not at college. Can I take a message?” She reached for the envelope with Bridget's note on the back and prepared to write.
“This is Belinda Green at Barrington Properties, I rang yesterday about her house. The thing is, we've had an offerâ”
“Oh, yes.” Loretta pictured herself taking down the message the previous afternoon, when she arrived back from London, and gave a guilty start as she realized she had not passed it on. “I'll remind her as soon as she gets in,” she said, concealing her memory lapse.
“The thing is, it's rather urgent. Professor Lai, that's the gentleman who's made the offer, he's anxious to know whether it's acceptable before he goes back to Newcastle. It is
Friday
. . .”
“Yes, I know.”
“And the other thing is, we've been picking up Dr. Bennett's post and sending it to Thebes Farm, but I didn't know if it was all right to go on doing that in the circumstances.”
“Oh, I'm sure it's all right,” Loretta assured her. Any letters posted today probably wouldn't arrive until Monday, and she was hoping Bridget would return home over the weekend.
“If you're sure.”
“Absolutely. And I'll get her to ring you the moment she gets in.”
This seemed to satisfy the estate agent, who put the phone down. Loretta yawned again, picked up the kettle and held it under the cold tap. She had not consciously thought about what day it was until Belinda Green jogged her memory: now she remembered that she was going to the opera that evening with Christopher Cisar.
“Oh, God.” Loretta turned off the tap and leaned against the sink, dismayed by the prospect of being trapped in a theater seat for three hours. Joe Lunderius had mocked her for what he called her “greatest hits” approach to opera, and it was true that she preferred listening to a tape of highlights from Mozart or Rossini to sitting through a live, unabridged performance. In her present hungover state, it even seemed possible that she might fall asleep; Loretta put down the kettle and put a hand up to her face, imagining she could feel tiny lines forming around her eyes. Her hair, too, was visibly suffering, hanging limply about her face as it did when she was coming down with a cold. For a moment she toyed with the idea of using this as an excuse to cry off and her hand went to the phone, dropping away when she realized she would have to look up the CES number in the phone book. The company's offices were on Osney
Island, Bridget talked about them often enough, but Loretta remembered the directory was upstairs and gave up.
She pushed herself away from the sink with a little grunt of irritation, saw the
Guardian
lying on a chair and leaned forward to pick it up. It was open at an inside page and her eye was caught by a small headline in News in Brief. “Oxford Murder: Police in New Appeal,” she read, followed by a couple of paragraphs which reported that detectives leading the inquiry into the murder at Thebes Farm were still trying to establish the victim's movements after getting off the plane at Heathrow. “Someone, somewhere, must have seen this young woman,” a spokeswoman was reported to have said, and the story went on to repeat details of the date, time and number of her flight to England and what she was believed to have been wearing. A final, one-paragraph sentence made Loretta's eyebrows shoot up: the police had, it seemed, spent the previous day digging up the drains at Thebes Farm in a final, fruitless attempt to locate the murder weapon.
Loretta put the paper down, shocked by the police's single-minded concentration on Bridget and Sam's house. The place must now be in an even worse mess, and she wondered whether there was any obligation on the police to tidy up afterwards. The phone sounded again and she picked it up, hoping it wasn't her mother demanding to know why Loretta had not yet returned her call of the previous evening.
“Loretta?” Not her mother but John Tracey, brusque and businesslike against a noisy, echoing background. “Listen, love, I'm calling from the coroner's court and I can't talk long. We're on our way back to your place and I wanted to make sure you were in. I don't suppose you have a fax machine?”
“A fax machine?”
“Or a modem? OK, in that case you'll just have toâ” He broke off and his voice grew faint, just loud enough for her to make out that he was arguing with someone who also wanted to use the phone. “Sorry, love. Listen, if the library rings before I arrive, can you just take down anything they've got? They know what I'm after. See you in about ten minutes.”
“Wait,” Loretta protested, “what's all this about?” but Tracey had already gone. She remained where she was for a moment, surprised by the brevity of the inquest, until a glance down at her bare wrist reminded her of her state of undress. Ten minutes, Tracey had said, and even allowing for traffic delays she had barely time to wash her face and get dressed before he arrived. Her headache cranked itself up a notch and she cast an anguished glance around the kitchen before hurrying into the dining room and throwing open the French windows to clear the sickly smell of food. Then she ran upstairs, pulling her T-shirt over her head as she went and narrowly missing the cat, who had stationed himself watchfully on the next-to-top step. A moment later she was in the shower, holding her head back from the stream of water to keep her hair dry and rekindling an old resentment against John Tracey for using her as an unpaid secretary.
“Slow down, I'm taking this down by hand. The what of November did you say? Twenty-second. And this is 1988? Hold on.” Tracey took the receiver from his ear and turned to glare at Bridget and Loretta. “Can you two keep your voices down? I can't hear a thing she's saying.” He waited until they'd fallen silent and swiveled back to his notebook, which was on the worktop next to the phone. “OK, go on,” he said, pen poised.
“Aged thirty-two and she was from where? Andover. She did?” He whistled. “Picked the wrong one there, didn't he? No, I didn't meanâ” He held the phone away from him for a few seconds, muttering “Blimey” in a barely audible voice, then returned the receiver to his mouth. “What is this,” he said, “the Canary Wharf branch of SCUM?” Loretta's eyes widened, picturing the slow-moving elderly men who had run the
Sunday Herald
library in the old days and wondering if they had all retired rather than move to Docklands.
“OK, OK,” said Tracey, backtracking fast. “I take all your points and if we could just get back to the story. You're sure that's the lot? Could you do me one more favor and fax it over to the Randolph? The Randolph Hotel in Oxford. I don't know their fax number but if you ring the main switchboard . . . Yeah, hang on.” He turned to the cover of his notebook and read out the number. “Make sure you mark it urgent to me, because there are other hacks staying there and I don't want it falling into the wrong hands. All right. Yes, all right, I'll be on this number for a while if youâ” The connection had obviously been cut at this point for Tracey banged the receiver back into its rest and said sarcastically: “Thanks, Sheila.” His annoyance had disappeared, however, by the time he turned back to Loretta with the tense, eager expression she knew to mean he was on the trail of a hot story.
“There's going to be one hell of a row,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Four attacks on women in, let's see, two and a half yearsâsince the autumn of eighty-eight. All on the same stretch of road, and the cops haven't said a
word.”
“But what's it got to do with”âLoretta waved her hand, feeling a superstitious reluctance to use the word
“murder” in Bridget's presenceâ“with, you know, Thebes Farm?”
“Hah,” Tracey exclaimed with deep satisfaction. “I'm coming to that. You should've been at the inquest.”
“It was extraordinary, Loretta,” Bridget confirmed, looking as elated, in her own way, as Tracey. “I mean, I was half expectingâ” She stopped, glancing nervously at him.
“What happened?
” Loretta demanded.
Tracey said: “Shall I?” and Bridget nodded.
“OK, the first thing is, the brother's supposed to show up and he doesn't.”
Loretta raised her eyebrows, thoroughly confused.
“So the cops are hopping madâtwo of them were at Heathrow to meet his plane this morning and he wasn't on it. There's no message, nothing, and it's the middle of the night in Ohio. These people, the Copycats, they aren't on the phone so they have to wake up the local cops and get them to go out there at first light. Anyway, he's just explained all this through gritted teeth, Superintendent Dibden, when the coroner says, âIn that case can we turn to the day she arrived in Britainâwhat progress have you made tracing her movements?' Etcetera etcetera. And he saysâwhat he says is they have new evidence which links her disappearance with a series of attacks on women on the A34.”
“The A34? But the coach from Heathrow to Oxford goes on the M25 and the M40. Even if she hired a car it's a long way round. And presumably the first thing they did was check with Avis?”
“Ah, well,” said Tracey, making the most of telling the story. “It turns out they've got a witnessâtwo, in fact. Someone rang on Tuesday, as soon as her description was in the papers, to say he'd seen her getting into a van at some roundabout just north of Newbury, but
they didn't believe him for the reasons you've just been saying . . . Until yesterday evening, that is, when this woman got in touch. You know that tunnel you go through when you're leaving the airport? Goes up to the M4?
She
says she saw her, the Wolf girl, hanging about there trying to get a lift, so she stopped and asked her where she was going. She said she was hitching to Oxford; this woman tried to tell her how dangerous it was but she wouldn't listen. In the end she, the driver, told her to hop in and she'd take her as far as Newbury. She'd hired a car to go to Bristol, apparently, so she had to go along the M4. She was going to come off the motorway and drop her at the bus station but there was a lot of traffic and by the time she got to Newbury she was running late. The roundabout's a few miles north of town so the girl said, just drop me here. Unfortunately, it looks like she got straight into the van belonging to this bloke whoâ” Tracey drew his hand flat across his throat in a vivid but inaccurate illustration of his meaning.