Fruitful Bodies (23 page)

‘Professor Takahashi, tell us if you would about your first wife. Let’s have the details. How
exactly
did she die?’

Long before the question had been put in Japanese, Professor Takahashi’s composure collapsed in a gasp of appalled horror. He swayed in his chair as if the breath had been knocked out of him and with desperate eyes appealed to his lawyer.

‘That’s a totally unacceptable line of questioning! My client will not—’

‘Must I answer? What is this matter to do with this? This is most difficult matter, one I do not wish to …’ The rest of his sentence was lost in an outburst of weeping. As he fished for a handkerchief and struggled to control himself, Debbie Trowbridge repeated furiously that such a line of questioning was irrelevant. She was well within her rights to do so, Andrew thought, nodding reluctantly and concedingly, but nonetheless Takahashi’s reaction had been very interesting indeed.

*     *     *

A
NDREW LEFT
the winding-up of the interview to Bridger and returned to the Major Incident Room. It was empty of people although stale with their flat, exhaled air. The team would be out on another round of interviewing which, Andrew thought hopelessly as he sank on to a chair, probably would not produce any new leads but, because it just might, had to be done and was indeed the only course open to them in the absence of anything more to go on. Andrew knew that at least one, probably more than one, witness was out there somewhere, and he knew too that
unless he, she or they were tracked down there would be no chance of building a case. Numerous pleas to the public to come forward with information had yielded nothing except scores of possible sightings of the suspect which so far were turning out, on further enquiry, to be nebulous claims of ‘noticing something a bit funny’. Yet all of them demanded a frustrating amount of time and effort which, Andrew now recalled with scorn, Bridger called ‘officer input’. It had been an education to discover just how many Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, as well as Singaporean, Taiwanese, Peruvian, Turkish, French, Irish and Belgian) visitors had been in Bath drawing attention to themselves on that last Saturday in July. The enquiry team had also had, along with the sincere but mistaken majority of people responding with information, the usual small showing of prats whose weak-brained or malicious claims had wasted the usual amount of time, but they still had not found one essential, reliable witness who could give a positive identification of Takahashi in Bath early that morning, at or near the scene of the offence, and whose willingness to be tested would allow them to proceed with an ID parade. Not that that in itself would provide conclusive proof of anything, but it would at least enable them to punch some holes in Takahashi’s claims about a missed lunchtime appointment.

Forensic had not helped. They had pulled, along with some of her own, a couple of deeply embedded hairs of her husband’s from the dead woman’s cardigan, which proved nothing except that at some point he had been in close contact with his wife. They had also found fibres from the bedspread at the B&B at Limpley Stoke, one of Hilary’s hairs and a couple of white ones near the cuff,
which had turned out to belong to Miffy. Miffy was the cat belonging to Mrs Heffer, the Golightlys’ nearest neighbour, who confirmed that Mrs Takahashi had stopped to stroke the cat during one of her walks in the vegetable garden.

Andrew sighed and looked round the Incident Room, its walls covered with sheets of diligent, hopeless mapping, pictures, blackboard lists of names and numbers waiting for mechanistic, dogged checking and rechecking. The chalked Happy Birthday! message to one of the team in one corner of the blackboard was the only confirmation that the crew working here under DS Bridger’s immediate supervision was not utterly demoralised, for the room seemed empty not just of people but of energy and optimism. Miffy’s chances in hell seemed a better bet than Andrew’s hopes of finding a worthwhile lead.

B
UNNY KNEW IT
was Tuesday. She also knew ‘it’ was Petronella, for she knew no one else who spoke in that tinny tone. Bunny sighed but did not open her eyes. She had been able to see to it that Petronella acquired a decent accent, that being a matter simply of the right choice of school, but she had been unable to amend her daughter’s needling voice, which had made Bunny itch to slap her almost from the minute she could speak. Before that, actually.

‘It’s Petronella,’ went the voice again. ‘Petronella’s here, Mummy, so’s Hugh. You’re in the Sulis, and it’s Tuesday. Mummy, are you awake?’

Bunny sighed again and opened her eyes. ‘Of course I’m awake and I know very well it’s Tuesday. What on earth’s the point of telling me it’s Tuesday?’ The effort of pushing out the words started a fit of coughing. She allowed herself to be raised from her pillow until she was sitting up in bed. She rather guardedly took the cup of tea that Petronella was proffering and found to her private delight that the tremor in her hands had subsided. She drank in steady draughts until the cup was empty.

‘Camomile and parsley,’ she said, decisively.

‘Dr Golightly thought it would help,’ Hugh put in earnestly, from the other side of the bed.

‘Help what?’ Bunny asked. ‘I’m perfectly all right. Except that I’m hungry.’

Petronella and Hugh smiled at each other across the bed. ‘That’s wonderful!’ Petronella said. ‘I’ll go and find someone, shall I, and get something brought up.’ She almost skipped to the door, watched by an unamused Bunny.

‘Can’t see what’s wonderful about it,’ she said crisply to Hugh after the door had closed. ‘Perfectly natural. I haven’t eaten since Sunday, so I’m bound to be hungry.’

Hugh smiled. ‘Poor thing’s relieved, that’s all. You gave us a bit of a fright, you know. You have been rather out of it, shaking and whatnot, sleeping all hours and mumbling. Petronella thought you were er … seeing things. You did seem confused.’

Bunny looked pleased for the first time. ‘My body and mind simply required rest. I keep telling you, the body heals itself when you let it tell you what it needs. And of course I wasn’t confused. I’m not gaga yet. Where’s Warwick?’

‘He’s—well, actually, I was hoping we could clear the air about Warwick. If you’re up to having a little chat about him.’

‘Chat about Warwick? Where is he? Warwick’s my lifeline.’

‘Well, that’s rather it, actually. The thing is, Pet was rather worrying in case you’d got yourself into some commitment or other with the chap and we’re not sure quite how things would lie then, you see. Vis-à-vis us, and the
er … you know, your next grandchild. I don’t know if you remember …’

‘Of course I remember. There’s to be another.’ Bunny sighed heavily and shook her head. ‘I was the same.
So
fertile men just had to
look
at me. I did get in some scrapes. At least Petronella is married, and one supposes to the father. That’s something.’

Hugh cleared his throat and spoke with his eyes focused somewhere near the top of Bunny’s headboard. ‘You see, as far as things go with Warwick, we did wonder—I mean it’s your decision of
course
but you haven’t known him long and I’m sure he’s good company and so on, but we wouldn’t want you to be er … well, let down. If supposing, later on, I mean, we don’t really know anything about him, after all.’

Hugh glanced at Bunny, saw her look of amused distrust and knew he was going to have to lay it on the line. ‘I mean look, the new baby’s going to wallop us hard, needless to say. In the old wallet. And we are so grateful for the help you gave for the boys and the decision’s yours, of
course
. But really, I always feel one should treat them all the same if one possibly can, all fair do’s, so to speak. Pet’s worried sick quite frankly and she feels as I do that after all, family comes first and this one will be the last after all. Frankly, perhaps we should be a little wary of Warwick’s motives, I mean I take it you do see that.’

‘Warwick,’ Bunny repeated slowly, ‘is my lifeline.’ She turned flinty eyes to Hugh and said, almost accusingly, ‘You do know he had the most terrible time in the war. Terrible. Your generation doesn’t understand. What is quite wonderful is the way he’s always so cheerful. He can’t do enough for me, you know.’

‘Yes, I’m sure, but I mean has he—have you, er … shown your appreciation, in any
material
way? Has he suggested any kind of well … permanent arrangement?’

‘Warwick is a gentleman,’ Bunny said. ‘I wonder that you can even ask.’

Just then Petronella returned, followed by Sister Yvonne who in turn was followed by Ivan, bearing a tray.

‘I
do any suggesting that is required,’ Bunny went on. ‘And I won’t discuss it any more.’

‘You
are
honoured, Mrs F. Feeling more yourself? The man himself has brought you some lunch,’ Sister Yvonne said, giving the bedcovers some brisk smoothing down. ‘All specially prepared.’

Ivan carefully placed the tray on the hospital table which swung over the bed. On it were three exquisitely arranged plates: one with a multicoloured salad, one piled with bread, crackers and lentil pâté, the last filled with scented summer fruits. A jug of viscous yellow juice stood next to them.

‘Mango and orange,’ Ivan said, smiling, as he poured some into a glass. ‘Nice to see you better. Enjoy. Wait till you taste those strawberries. I’ll let Warwick know you’re feeling better. He’s been missing you, he says.’

Bunny smiled complacently through a mouthful of bread and pâté. ‘Tell Warwick to visit me this afternoon. I may feel up to some work on his head. And tell him’—she narrowed her eyes in Hugh’s direction—‘that I can’t wait to see him and talk about our plans.’

P
OOR OLD
D
AN
had asked his dad to take him to Legoland on his birthday but Valerie had put a stop to that, designating the birthday treat to be in her gift.

‘I’m taking them to Legoland on the Saturday. You’re getting him on the actual day. Take them on a picnic or something,’ she had told Andrew on Sunday, arriving back from her Assertiveness Course in a hostile cloud of vindaloo fumes, round about the same time that Sara was flinging a Thai dinner for two across her garden.

‘But he asked me to take him,’ Andrew said. ‘He specially asked me and Sara to take him on Tuesday and it is his birthday, so if that’s what he wants—’

‘Oh, will you shut up about what
he
wants!’

Valerie’s fuses, always short, were now the length of stubble. ‘What about what
I
want for once? That’s just the point!
You
get to do all the nice treats, don’t you, while I get to do every other single bloody thing, every other bloody day of the week. All you do is breeze in and out at weekends with
her
and over-indulge them. Well, this time
I’m
doing the treat. It won’t kill you to take them on a simple little picnic, will it? Or doesn’t she do picnics?’

Andrew had opened his mouth to contest the justice of just about everything she had said, and closed it again. He desperately wanted to have the children with him for a night mid-week, but instead had to content himself with putting in short and cheerful visits to them on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Valerie would not allow the children to go to him on school nights on the grounds that it would unsettle them. He saw them every weekend that he was not working and tried to ensure that they did something together, just as he had done with them most weekends before the divorce. It was sometimes no more than a country ramble and a funny tea back at his poky flat, but it was true that he now made more effort to think of places to take them and things to do. This was what Valerie described as over-indulging them.

Indeed, there was nothing wrong with a simple picnic. But when Valerie dropped the children off at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning at Medlar Cottage she had not actually told them that they were not, as they were expecting, going to Legoland with Daddy and Sara. That little piece of news had been left for Andrew to impart. ‘Didn’t Mummy say? She’s taking you instead, on Saturday! Today,
we’re
going for a walk and a picnic!’ Not even the brightest tone of voice could sell a picnic over Legoland or convince Dan that he had not been betrayed by his father.

Sara happened to like picnics rather more than Andrew did, so it was she who had organised the food with what she privately thought was heroic selflessness and good humour. She had also picked up the broken china and glass from her garden, scrubbed the path clean of its food slick and hosed disgusting yellow spatterings off the surrounding shrubs. And she had not only not told Andrew of her
encounter on the towpath, she had decided not to mention Sunday at all. So she was not altogether delighted when Andrew suggested the towpath for the picnic.

‘Oh, why there? It’s rather boring, isn’t it? Why don’t we take them up to Browns Folly?’

‘Natalie hates climbing hills. The towpath’s flat.’

‘Well, what about going off to Bowood? There’s an adventure playground.’

‘Too far. Benji might be car sick.’

‘But he could get car sick going to Legoland.’

‘He’s welcome to be sick in Valerie’s car,’ Andrew said, and sighed. ‘All right, there’s no point hiding it from you. I wouldn’t mind just having another look at the Golightly place. Don’t know why but it still bugs me. Why she should have been staying there, of all places. There’s something we’re not getting. I just want to take a look.’

Sara understood, not quite what the Golightly place might have to do with any of it, but how it was that part of Andrew’s mind could not leave go, why he felt the need to pace the towpath again, thinking, wondering, looking, in the hope that he might finally see something. Although, she reassured herself sternly, it had been no such compulsion that had brought her there on Sunday night, for she was not involving herself in the case, difficult as it was to curb her natural nosiness. To do so only annoyed Andrew and diverted her attention from her work. Yet, had that not been part of it? That, even as she had felt herself lost in an irrational rage against Valerie, she had nevertheless brought herself, of all places, almost to the very spot that preoccupied her lover? And all she had found was a shivering vagrant. She really ought to leave the detective work to Andrew.