Arms and the Women (10 page)

'Shit. I've got my Liberata group coming round.'

'What's that? Plastic kitchenware or one of those sexy undies groups?'

'No, the Liberata Trust's a human rights organization, sort of Amnesty with feminist attitude . . . oh, ha ha.'

She saw from her friend's face that she was being sent up.

Daphne said, 'Oh well, if you'd rather save the world than have a drink with your friend . . .'

'Yeah, yeah. Truth is, the world's had to look after itself over the past couple of months. I've been feeling guilty - yes, I know; there I go again - so when Feenie rang about the next meeting, I said why not have it round here?'

'Feenie? You don't mean Serafina Macallum, the mad bag lady?'

'That's right. Our founder, chair and driving force. How on earth do you know her?'

'She sold us the bothy. Or at least her lawyer did. We never met her during the negotiations, but I've come close to being run down by her several times, both in that clapped-out Land Rover she drives, and on that ancient bike. You'd think she had something against me.'

Ellie concealed the thought that this was probably truer than Daphne guessed. She knew that what Feenie Macallum resented about the break up of her family estate wasn't losing bits of property but the kind of people she had to lose them to.

Her own ignorance of the details of the Aldermanns' purchase of a country cottage lay in her knee-jerk disapproval when Daphne had mentioned it a couple of years earlier.

'Patrick loves to see the kids and their friends enjoying themselves but he does go white when he sees them turning the garden into a football pitch or a badminton court, so I said, Why don't we buy a chunk of unspoilt countryside which they can then spoil to their hearts' content,' she'd said.

And Ellie hadn't been able to bite back the caustic comment that helping put the price of rural housing out of the reach of other people's children hardly seemed a proportionate solution to Patrick's concern for his precious roses.

The cottage hadn't been much mentioned between them thereafter, and when it was, Ellie hadn't been able to decide if Daphne's insistence on calling it
the bothy
was diplomatic understatement or provocative meiosis. Nor was she really sure whether her own attitude was pure social indignation or part dog-in-the-manger envy.

Now she wished she hadn't been so quick to make it a no-go area, both conversationally and geographically, as her certainty that Feenie Macallum would have soaked the purchasers for as much as she could get, then put the money to some very good use, would have allowed her to have her cake and eat it.

'Anyway,' continued Daphne, 'she doesn't look as if she knows what day of the week it is. Ring her up, tell her she's got it wrong.'

'Feenie is as sharp as a butcher's knife,' retorted Ellie. 'And there are others concerned and I've mucked them about once already. The meeting should have been yesterday, but when I thought I was going to be riding herd on the school outing, I had to ring round everybody and rearrange. Oh God. I forgot to remind Peter they were coming.'

'Never mind,' said Daphne. 'What pleasanter surprise can there be for a hard-working bobby than to come home and find his house full of anarchist do-gooders? So let's see if we can find a window in your crowded calendar. Lunch sometime later this week? Patrick's going to some horticultural conference in Holland in the morning, Diana's down at her cousin's in Dorset and David's at the bothy with some sixth-form chums. God, you are lucky to be in the State system. Costs you nothing and they spend most of their time at school, while we pay a fortune and ours are hardly ever there!'

Ellie smiled, but didn't rise. A wise avenger picks her own payback time. Lunch at Rosemont, which invariably consisted of Marks and Sparks goodies tarted up to look home-made, should provide a good launch pad.

'That sounds great,' she said. 'Any day but tomorrow. We're going out to Enscombe. They've got some kind of menagerie at the Hall. Ed Wield, who lives in the village, was foolish enough to mention it to Rosie and she didn't leave him alone till he promised to show her round.'

'Wield? That's the ugly sergeant, isn't it? Didn't you say he was a bit... ?'

Daphne made a rocking gesture with her hand.

'Gay?' said Ellie. 'That's right. Except not a bit. All of him. And despite anything you learned at Sunday School, it doesn't mean he lies in wait for small children.'

'Never thought it did,' said Daphne. 'He struck me as a very nice man. And I recall Daddy saying that he preferred his curates gay, as it was easier to look after the choir when the curate was around than it was to look after the curate with the Mothers' Union in full cry. Now I must whizz off and earn my keep. A garden centre caff! The mind boggles.'

'Regards to Patrick,' said Ellie. 'And watch out for greenfly.'

She waved her friend goodbye, noting with self-mocking envy that since last they met she'd changed her car again for a sporty Audi, gave another wave to DC Dennis Seymour, and went back inside.

Mention of her Liberata meeting reminded her that she'd promised herself to do a bit of preparation. She'd completely neglected this and most other commitments during the past few weeks, but when Feenie Macallum asked questions, a wise acolyte had answers. She went back upstairs and switched on the laptop. There were no visible after effects of the coffee and she clicked on Liberata in her
Documents
and studied the names that came up. These were the women Feenie had allocated to her to be in correspondence with. Most were in prison. All were in trouble. Few were able to reply, so writing to them was often an act of faith. But as Feenie said, even if the letter is intercepted, it tells someone out there that we know these women exist and are victims, and that might make the difference between life and death.

She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie's affections. There'd been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She'd mentioned this to Feenie, who'd said, 'If someone offers you a helping hand when you're drowning, you grip tight.'

She began to write.

Dear Bruna,

How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.

She paused and tried to think how
turned upside down
could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bits of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn't necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from
The House at Pooh Corner
to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna's last letter had offered a
gracias
for 'the book', meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie's illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn't feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?

She returned her attention to the letter.

How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie's words came back to her. 'Tell them everything about yourself,' she commanded. 'However trite, however tragic. That way they'll know you really care, you're not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you're doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.'

But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.

'Best you don't know,' she said. 'These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can't imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.'

Ellie began typing again.

My little girl Rosie was taken ill. . .

The phone rang.

Irritated, she went next door into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.

'What?' she bellowed.

'Charming. I wish I hadn't bothered.'

'Daphne, is that you? What's up? You forget something?'

'Only how brusque you can be. Listen, I just thought I'd ring you to tell you you're being watched.'

'Yes, I know. Dennis Seymour. I thought you said he spoke to you . . .'

'Don't be so
dim,
Ellie. I don't mean him. You know those plane trees on that little triangle of no-man's-land at the corner of your road? Well, I noticed this fellow hanging about there when I drove past earlier. Only then, not knowing anything about yesterday's punch-up at the Pascoe corral, I didn't pay much heed. But when I passed the trees just now and saw he was still there, still looking towards your house, I thought, Hello-Hello- Hello, this looks like one for a citizen's arrest.'

'Daphne, don't you dare! Don't do anything. I'll get the guy on watch to deal.'

'So what are you going to do? Run out of the house and point this way? No, listen, untwist your knickers. Count up to a hundred. All I'm going to do is get out of the car and stroll back towards him and distract him with brilliant conversation. When you get to a hundred,
then
head out to your guardian angel and send him winging this way as quick as he likes. And if chummy here tries to do a runner, I'll stick my leg out and send him sprawling, a tactic for which I was once renowned in Mid-Yorkshire girls' hockey circles.'

'No,' insisted Ellie. 'Do nothing. I'll - '

'Start counting. One, two, three . . .'

The phone went dead.

Ellie didn't hesitate. She went sprinting down the stairs, out of the house, down the drive, waving and calling to the watching Seymour. He spotted her and started to get out of the car.

'No!' she screamed. 'Stay there! Start up!'

He was, God be thanked, quick-witted enough to obey.

'Turn, turn, turn! Go, go, go!' commanded Ellie, scrambling into the passenger seat.

'Where are we going?' he asked calmly as he accelerated through a U-turn, getting the car up to sixty in about nine seconds.

'We're there!' she yelled. 'Stop. Oh, sweet Jesus.'

The car snaked to a halt alongside the plane trees.

A figure slumped against one of them, head thrown back to show a face which was a mask of blood.

'Call an ambulance,' cried Ellie, leaping from the car and rushing towards her friend. 'Daphne, are you all right?'

The woman made a gasping noise which may or may not have been an answer, but at least her eyes were open and she was moving and breathing.

'Why didn't you wait?' Ellie couldn't stop herself from asking as she knelt to examine the damage. 'Oh Jesus. What a mess. Is it just your face or are you hurt anywhere else?'

'. . . aar . . .' gasped Daphne.

'What? Where?'

'Car. Bastard took my car. Oh God. Look at the state of this blouse.'

vii

a pint of Guinness

'That's two days in succession our street's been full of police cars,’ said Ellie. 'The neighbours are going to start complaining about you bringing your work home.'

'They should think themselves lucky I'm not a rock star,' said Pascoe.

'We should all think ourselves lucky for that,' said Ellie.

They were at the hospital, to which Ellie had accompanied Daphne in the ambulance. Pascoe had arrived almost simultaneously. He could see she was seriously stressed, but coping by dint of having someone else to look after. Activity had always been her way of dealing with life's ambushes.

She'd told him what little she knew. Daphne had gasped out her car number and the policeman on watch had put out an alert. Apart from that, she had on Ellie's insistence concentrated on using her mouth for breathing.

'Peter, how're you doing? You here for Mrs Aldermann?'

Dr John Sowden was an old acquaintance, almost an old friend, of Pascoe's. They had first met at the intersection of a police and medical case and perhaps because that had marked out so clearly the parameters of their areas of common ground, their friendship had somehow only flourished in miniature, like a bonsai tree.

'That's right. How is she?'

'Fine, considering someone's given her a fair bang on the nose. Broken but I think we'll get away without surgery.'

'Any other injuries?'

'No. Some shock from the assault and the loss of blood, but nothing that a good night's rest won't put right. I've got a nurse cleaning her up now, then she'll be ready to go home. What is it? Your friendly neighbourhood mugging? Were you with her when it happened, Ellie? Can check you out as well, if you like.'