Lovers and Liars (82 page)

Hawthorne had moved now, a little to his left, and the woman turned to face him. She picked up something from a table on the edge of frame, and then began to massage oil into her breasts. Her skin gleamed. Her black-gloved hands moved assiduously; her nipples stiffened. She paused, looking at Hawthorne as if for approval then smiled, and hung her head.

Everything was wrong, Pascal thought. He couldn’t understand, now, how his eyes and his mind could have been deceived like that. The hair, and the way it was arranged, that might be a careful copy of the way Gini wore her hair, and the dress, of course, was the same, but now that he could see this blonde, full-face and in full light, the resemblance to Gini was small this was not his Gini, but Gini as imagined by someone else, Hawthorne presumably. At that, Pascal’s mind went blank with anger; his limbs and his hands began to function again. He would

537

fix this bastard once and for all, he thought. The camera motor whirred, and the shutter began to click.

Ten frames, fifteen, twenty exposures. Pascal’s habitual cold objectivity locked into place. What was actually happening opposite became now almost an irrelevance: to him it was work, a task, a sequence of light, shade and angle. It was without nuance or emotional content, not sex witnessed, but abstract shapes. Shapes to be captured on film, given these lighting conditions, this distance, this equipment. His concentration was absolute. The only reality was the moving patterns in his viewfinder and the infinitesimal alterations in focus or shutter speed. What he saw through his viewfinder was depersonalized: it was not Hawthorne and an unknown blonde, but a series of attitudes. All that counted was to capture with technical precision the attitudes and angles which, when processed, when printed, would provide him with proof.

He stopped to change film. His injured arm ached. He extracted the used film, inserted the new one, and wound it on. He bent to the viewfinder again.

The black basque the woman wore cinched her waist viciously; it was made of some high-shine material which refracted light. Pascal made a tiny adjustment to aperture to compensate for this, and adjusted focus. While he had changed film, the couple had moved away from the window. Hawthorne, Pascal saw, was still fully dressed, and for the purposes of his pictures was now badly placed, sideways on, with his head bent, looking down at the blonde. The blonde was kneeling in front of him, looking up. Pascal fired off a few shots then waited for the moment when Hawthorne might lift his head. The woman was now beginning to fumble at Hawthorne’s crotch. She ran her gloved hands up the inside of his thighs, then began to stroke his groin. It was then that Pascal began to have the uneasy sensation that all might not be as it seemed.

The woman’s eagerness was evident: she was clearly aroused and Hawthorne, equally clearly, was not.

He was watching her in a cold dispassionate way; nothing in his attitude suggested response. His hands were by his sides. He made no attempt to touch the blonde, or to aid her. He lifted his face very slightly. Pascal took one shot, then another, then stopped. His mind was now beginning to work again, he could think in a more normal mode, and he could read the expression on Hawthorne’s features, which was one of dislike and contempt. The

538

woman shuddered, and rubbed her breasts against his thighs. As she reached up, as if to unfasten his trousers, Hawthorne hit her. The action was sudden, swift; the arm lifted, swung and smashed the woman across her face.

The blow was so hard that it knocked her to the ground. She fell back, halfrose, collapsed again, and then dragged herself a few feet away from him. She was now out of frame, hidden from Pascal’s view by the edge of the window. At exactly that moment, just as Pascal realized he could not go on with this, Hawthorne looked up. He turned full-face to the window, full-face to the camera, and gave a tight triumphant smile.

Pascal straightened, and stepped back. He saw now what he should have seen at once. This was not - could not be - unintentional. Would any man in Hawthorne’s position do this? Why stand in front of uncurtained, unshuttered windows, in full light? Why do any of those things, unless what was taking place opposite was a performance for Pascal’s benefit, his very own private viewing, carefully arranged and staged by John Hawthorne himself?

Bewildered Pascal bent to the viewfinder again. If this was intentional, i; made no sense. Why should Hawthorne wish to provide him with evidence, with proof? One second later, as the woman stepped back into frame, Pascal had the answer to that question. Instinctively he had begun to shoot. He stopped.

The woman in front of him now was no longer blondhaired; her hair reached just to her shoulders, and it was black. Perhaps the blow, and the fall, had dislodged the blond hairpiece she had been wearing, perhaps she had simply decided to dispense with it. Either way, something, a departure from normal rules maybe, had made her acutely distressed.

Her face was chalk white, and she was trembling with emotion, She began to pull off the black gloves. She threw them to the ground. She launched herself at Hawthorne with a sudden ferocity, punching and clawing, as if she were trying to scratch his face. Hawthorne caught hold of her, and put her aside with an easy strength. This seemed to please her. She shuddered and swung around so she was once again full-face to Pascal’s camera. She began to speak, a taunting expression on her face. Though Pascal could hear nothing, he could lip-read the words easily enough. Hit me, she said, once, twice, three times.

Hawthorne gave her a long, cold and considering look. In a deliberate way, he turned his back on her, crossed to the window, and began to close the shutters. Before he did so, he looked up one

539

last time, directly towards the window where Pascal stood. There was no mistaking the small tight smile he gave, or the derision in his eyes.

That smile said: your pictures are unusable. Pascal straightened. He watched the shutters opposite close. He felt an instant’s anger, then a flood of self-loathing. Game, set and match to Hawthorne, he thought. Of course the pictures were unusable. His pictures proved nothing beyond the fact that both the ambassador and his wife shared a taste for sexual games.

540

IT WAS a man outside the door, Gini was certain of that. The footsteps, punctuated by long periods of silence, were too heavy to have been a woman’s, but beyond that they told her little. She could not tell always, where he was: sometimes he would sound close, so she expected the door to open at any second, then he would seem to be moving about further off. Then she would think he had left, and then - after another long and terrifying silence she would hear him move again.

The darkness seemed to magnify sound and distort it. Was that breathing, or the wind moving through a branch? The night was filled with tiny rustling and scuffling sounds; there was an eerie intermittent whistling noise, thin and high above her, which she thought must be the wind seeping through the tiles of the roof.

She had lost all sense of time, and when she finally began to believe that the man had gone, that she might be alone, she had no idea if half an hour had passed, or more, or less. Her heart was beating painfully fast. She edged against the wall and felt for the light switch. Whether the man had gone or still remained, she could bear it no longer, she thought, this absence of light. She counted to ten, then pressed the light switch behind her. Nothing happened. She gave a low moan of fear, and slid down the wall into a crouching position. She remembered

the noise of that outhouse door being opened and shut. Perhaps there was some mains switch outside, or even a generator: the power had been shut off.

She crouched there, trying to think. Then she remembered: there were other power sources in this house. There was the paraffin stove, and the gas cooker in the kitchen. If lit, both would provide some light. She had no matches, but there were matches upstairs, on the floor by the sleepingbag. She started quickly across the kitchen, and felt her way into the living-room. She banged into the table, gave a cry, and felt for the wall. She found the door to the stairs, and the faint light in the room above gave her hope. Her hands were shaking: when she picked up the matchbox, she almost dropped it. Slowly, slowly, she said to herself. She opened the box: there were four matches left.

She tried the gas stove first. If it was supplied by mains gas, she felt certain that too would have been cut off. But a cottage this primitive and this remote was unlikely to be on a mains supply. There was a hissing, then at last, as she touched the match to the burner, some light.

It was bluish and wavering, but it steadied her at once. She listened. Still silence. She looked at her watch. She stared at its hands, unable to believe what they told her. It was past five. She’d been here more than an hour: more than an hour since that door had been slammed and locked. The realization made her frantic. She thought: I must get out of this place.

She tried the backdoor first, then the front. Both were heavy and reinforced with thick panelling, not normal old cottage doors. Why had she not noticed that? She tried pulling and pushing with all her strength: neither budged by so much as a centimetre. She edged back to the kitchen. The gas was still burning well. She opened a cupboard door next to the stove, and found the gas canister there. She looked at it fearfully, and tried to move it, but it was too heavy. It had no gauge. She had no way of telling how much gas was left.

She could not bear the thought of the gas expiring, of being without light. She began a frantic search for some other source of power - a flashlight, candles. There was none. Then she steadied herself, and forced herself to become calmer. The doors would not open, the rooflight was unreachable, the only means of exit were the windows - and the windows were boarded up.

There was a window in the kitchen, above the sink. She levered herself up onto the draining-board, and examined it. As with all

the other downstairs windows - two in the living-room, the one here - the boarding-up had been carefully done. The windows were completely covered with thick chipboard, nailed into their frames on the inside. The nails were at one-inch intervals all around the frame; the chipboard itself was in one thick sheet.

She climbed back down to the floor, and drew her coat tighter around her. It was bitterly cold, and any residual heat that there had been had worn off.

She made her way back through the bluish flickering darkness to the living-room, and eyed the paraffin stove. She had never used one, and she tried to remember how McMullen had lit it the evening they came here. There had been a little door on its side, which he opened, and some mechanism for turning up the wick. She worked out how to do it, finally, and lit it.

She adjusted it, as she had seen McMullen do, so the smoky yellow flame burned a clean blue. The light in this room was now a little stronger. She searched both it and the kitchen carefully, going through every cupboard, and every drawer. She laid out the array of implements on the kitchen table: three dinner knives, three forks, one teaspoon, a can-opener - no tools of any kind.

She climbed up on the draining-board again, and tried the knives first. She was breathing hard now, trying to keep her hands steady. She found she could insert the thin blade of the knife between board and window frame - but that was all. She slid the knife back and forth to try to loosen the board, but the blade was too weak. Growing more desperate, she pushed the blade right in, then tried to lever with the handle. Nothing happened. She wrenched harder. The blade snapped.

She gave a cry, and threw the broken handle down. She tried again, with a fork this time, first inserting the prongs under the chipboard, then, when that proved useless, the thicker handle end. But she could not thrust the fork under the chipboard far enough to get any leverage. She pushed harder, growing frantic, and her hand slipped. The fork juddered, and the prongs impaled her palm. With a cry of pain, she dropped it. Blood welled, and dripped down her fingers into the sink. She slid back down to the floor, and went to run the water in the sink. She turned the tap, but there was no water: nothing came out, just a trickle, then a dry gurgling sound.

For some reason that terrified her. She stared around her, and saw these rooms now as a trap. She had no water and no food. The gas and the paraffin would last only so long. This house

-one knew she was here. She was remote, unused, closed up. No

could be here for days, weeks.

Panic swept into her mind, swamping any ability to think. Blood dripped from her hand into the white of the sink. The air in the room was now dry and acrid from the gas. She slumped against the sink, fighting down the fear, telling herself to be calm. She found a cloth, and wrapped it around her bleeding hand; she lowered the flame of the gas, and of the paraffin stove, so that their fuel would last longer, and she made herself think. s. Pascal knew. It wasn’t true that no-one knew where she wa

He might not know precisely, because she had not mentioned the cottage to him, but he knew that she had been going to the railwayline below. He was expecting her in London at six. When she did not return, eventually, he would take action. He would work out where she might have gone. It was foolish to think of being trapped here for days or weeks - that was not going to happen. She would be found, and released. But she had no intention of waiting that long: she was going to get out of this place by herself -

She thought of Pascal. She saw his face and heard his voice. He felt suddenly very close, and this sense of his closeness gave her courage. She climbed back up onto the draining-board, and felt the edge of the chipboard carefully. Halfway down on the right-hand side, one of the nails was driven in at a poor angle. It was looser than the others. Slowly and carefully this time, she inserted the blade of the second knife. She began to lever it gently, back and forth, back and forth.