What Men Say (18 page)

She heard a clink as Tracey finished his drink and disposed of his glass on the coffee table. He was silent for a moment and she could picture his face, irritation fading as his sense of fairness asserted itself and he tried to think of a way to explain.

“What you've got to understand,” he said finally, “is how the police work these days—the pressure they're under. The tabloids, they don't make any distinction between
a murder and a new soap opera. Each day's another episode and if there isn't a sensational development they make it up, it's a sort of feeding frenzy. Christ, would you like to run a murder inquiry with the
Sun
breathing down your neck? Not to mention having to go on
Crimewatch
and MPs banging on in Parliament about the clear-up rate. Did I ever tell you there was a rumor Mrs. Thatcher was going to go up to Leeds and take over the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry herself if they didn't stop making a mess of it?”

Loretta turned, her eyes wide with interest. “Did she?” Then she remembered the subject of their conversation and filed this juicy tidbit away for another occasion. “Did he explain, this cop you talked to, why on earth Bridget would want to bump off a complete stranger and hide the body in her own garden? Assuming, as I suppose we must, that a pregnant woman suffering from high blood pressure is
capable
of transporting a corpse—”

Tracey gritted his teeth. “Calm down, Loretta, it wasn't like that. All he was doing was marking my cards.”

“Sorry?”

“Giving me a steer. Off the record, just to let me know the way they're thinking.”

“Blacken someone's name, you mean, without giving them a chance to answer back? I think that's terrible.”

“Loretta, you may not like it but there's a relationship between the cops and the press—a symbiosis, to use one of your long words. They tell us things off the record, it gives us an idea where the story's going—what angles we need to have covered. All he said was they're not one hundred percent satisfied that your mate and her husband are in the clear. What is all this about her losing her diary, anyway?”

“Keep your voice down,” she hissed, playing for time. “They're only one floor down, they'll hear you.” She had introduced Tracey to Sam and then left him in earnest conversation with Bridget—something about a problem with the landscape gardeners and whether they should employ another firm—in the kitchen.

Tracey shook his head and felt in his jacket pocket. “This wasn't my idea,” he said more quietly, drawing out a packet of Gitanes.
“If
you remember.”

“You've started smoking again?”

He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match and lit up. “It's a stressful occupation, journalism.” He got up, looking for somewhere to discard the spent match, and Loretta watched him prowl the room with the familiar coiled energy of someone used to dodging bullets and having doors closed in his face. She had not yet got over her surprise at his outfit, a cream linen suit which marked a startling break with his long-standing attachment to the fashion of the 1960s, and she felt an unexpected pang of nostalgia for his crumpled old denim and corduroys.

“In my study,” she said shortly, seeing he was about to toss the match into the empty grate. “You'll find an ashtray on top of the filing cabinet.” He strolled to the other end of the room, glancing from side to side with the professional interest of a reporter, and it occurred to her that his prematurely gray hair had been a blessing in disguise. While other middle-aged men had to live with creeping signs of physical decay, Tracey had done his aging early and had the knack of remaining a slightly more lined version of his youthful self.

“I don't let it get above ten a day,” he remarked, picking up the ashtray and dropping the match into it.

Loretta moved towards him, not quite into the study but close enough to speak in a low voice. “Do they
know about us?” she said, as near as she dared get to the question she really wanted to ask.

He blew out smoke. “Are they expecting me to report back, is that what you mean? Well, Chief Superintendent, I passed on your suspicions to my ex-wife as requested and she broke down and confessed . . . You've accused me of a lot of things, Loretta, but this is the first time you've accused me of being a copper's nark. Don't you remember Roderick Benson?”

“Roderick—yes.” Benson was a small-time south London crook, wrongly convicted of murder, whose case Tracey had successfully taken up on his return from Cyprus.

She slumped against the doorframe, lifting her head to look at the hinge impressions, still visible through several coats of paint, which marked the point from which big old wooden doors had once hung. “I don't know what to say,” she admitted at last, pushing her hair back from her face. “I mean, she hasn't confided in me. Whatever she was doing that day, though, I'm sure it hasn't anything to do with . . . this.”

Tracey stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back against the filing cabinet. He said reasonably: “You've got to admit it doesn't look good. There they are, trying to piece together where everyone was on the day the victim arrived in England, and Bridget gives the vaguest possible account of herself
and
claims to have lost her diary. Would
you
write it off as sheer coincidence?”

She made an impatient gesture. “Has Sam told them what he was doing that Thursday?”

Tracey raised his eyebrows, picking up the antagonism in her voice. “Interesting point. His secretary was on holiday that week and he had a temp. She
thinks
he was in his office all day, but she's as thick as two short planks and their offices are on opposite sides of the corridor.
However,” he added, before she could speak, “this being the age of computers he's got a much better alibi than some dozy girl. Ever heard of an audit trail?”

Loretta shook her head.

“It's basically a security measure.” Tracey moved to her desk, lifted the lid of her laptop and switched it on. “It tells you who's used the computer and what for—very useful if you think someone's trying to get into files they're not authorized to see. Industrial espionage and so on In this case the audit trail has him logging on just before ten and staying on virtually all day. Neat little machine you've got here—what software do you use?”

“Word something? I can't remember. But how does it, the computer, know it was Sam? Couldn't he have left it on, hypothetically I mean, and someone else was actually doing the work?”

Tracey snapped off the blue screen. “No, because they use a repeat authentication process. You have to put your password in at regular intervals, and they use a handshaking system in case someone discovers your password.”

“A what?”

“I don't know the technical details, but each time you put in your password it asks you a series of questions—anything from the name of your dog to your wife's star sign. If someone else was standing in for him, he'd have to be very fully briefed—an accomplice, in fact.”

“Oh,” Loretta said quickly, “I never really thought . . . Presumably it only matters till they find out when she was killed? I mean, as soon as they find someone who saw her alive after Thursday—”

“
If
someone saw her after Thursday. The sightings they've had so far are either vague or unlikely—”

“Sightings? You mean people have come forward?”

“Don't get excited, these things take days to sift through and they mostly come to nothing. She seems to have been a complete stranger in this country, and so far no one's come forward to say she booked into my hotel for two nights. All they've had is people who
think
they may have served her in a shop and the usual bunch of loonies.” He swiveled her desk chair round and sat on it with his back to the desk, swinging gently from side to side. “The other question is, how far do you go, chasing red herrings, when someone's behaving suspiciously right under your nose? The cops almost never fit up people they think are innocent,” he added conversationally, leaning back and picking up a post-card lying on her desk. He examined the image, an illustration from a fifteenth-century edition of the
Roman de la Rose,
without much interest and turned it over to read the message on the back. Discovering it was blank, he tossed it to one side and added: “Most miscarriages of justice, the famous ones, you'll find cops to this day who think they're guilty. The most they'll admit is that someone in CID may have improved the evidence.”

“That's one way of putting it.”

“I'm not defending them, Loretta.” He swung the chair through ninety degrees to get a better view of her desk and drew a literary journal towards him, tapping the cover with his fingers. “This rag still going?” He scanned the list of contents, casting Loretta an amused glance as he reached her article, “The Importance of Being George: Transsexual Pseudonyms from George Eliot to George Egerton.” The journal was printed on flimsy paper, all the impoverished editorial board could afford, and he rustled noisily through it until he reached Loretta's pages. He read for a moment, raising his eyebrows over her theories on literary gender-bending, and dropped it back on her desk. “What worries me,” he
said, as if he'd only just remembered what they had been discussing, “is
you
being mixed up in all this. I know you're her friend but there are limits.”

The door into the other end of the room opened and they heard Bridget's voice: “Loretta?”

She looked at Tracey, appealing for help with her eyes, but he merely shrugged.

“In here,” she called, glaring at Tracey, and Bridget advanced into the drawing room until she could see into the study.

“Sorry,” she said, seeming to sense that she had arrived at an awkward moment, and attempted to make a joke of the interruption: “It's just that I am eating for two these days and I am rather hungry.”

“What time is it?” Loretta looked down at her watch.

“Five past eight. I mean, we can just as well go out, Sam and I—”

“God, no. All I've got to do is cook the pasta.”

Tracey said: “Can't it wait till I've had a look at this video? It's all set up.” Seeing Bridget's face, he added: “This isn't one of my whims, in fact it affects you as much as it does me.”

“What?” Bridget looked unconvinced and Loretta cringed at the speed at which aggression flared between them. She dropped her head into her hand, a gesture Bridget must have seen because a moment later Loretta heard her say: “Oh, all right. Just a minute while I get Sam.”

Loretta listened to Bridget's rather heavy step on the stairs and then said urgently to Tracey: “God, John, I wish you'd told me earlier. I didn't know what to say to her.”

He looked grim. “Say nothing. Let's have a look at this video and at least we'll have something to talk about over dinner. Hi,” he added with false bonhomie as
Bridget returned with Sam. Gesturing towards a sofa, he added: “Sit yourselves down.”

Bridget closed the door behind her and joined Sam, giving his hand an anxious squeeze. His face was blank, stony almost, and Loretta guessed he had not welcomed this further delay in eating.

“Let me get some more wine,” she suggested, catching sight of her empty glass and thinking she needed another drink to cope with the frigid atmosphere in the room. Tracey lifted his head from the television controls and gave her a cross look but she ignored him and ran downstairs to open another bottle of Chianti.

“Ready?” Tracey demanded as she came back into the room. Loretta nodded, refilled her own glass and left the bottle on the table for the others to help them-selves. Curling up on the sofa under the window, well away from Bridget and Sam, she thought of all the things she would rather be doing this evening—marking essays, finishing the mediocre novel she had promised to write about for the
TLS,
even the pile of ironing on top of the washing machine in the downstairs bathroom.

Tracey pressed a button and a blizzard of dots filled the TV screen. It was rapidly replaced by a clock face, white graphics on a black background and a second hand gliding smoothly up to the hour. Loretta heard a familiar theme tune, a series of plangent notes played on an electric guitar, and recognized a montage of film clips as the opening sequence of a current-affairs program on Channel Four: the Pope waving from a balcony, a motorcade speeding along a Washington avenue, the late Ayatollah Khomeini raising his arm in front of an adoring crowd in Tehran. Suddenly the screen went black, and three words appeared in shimmering silver: CRIMINALS FOR CHRIST?

“The Imitators of Christ,” a woman's voice began,
classless and authoritative, “are the descendants of a group of deeply religious German immigrants who came to live in America in the 1870s. They settled in fertile farming country in Ohio”—the screen now showed a horse-drawn cart moving across the land at sunset, an animated version of a Hopper painting—“about twenty-five miles from the nearest town. Their descendants stubbornly resist modern inventions like the motor car, the television and the telephone, and their dress has remained largely unchanged for a century. They take their name from a famous devotional work from the fifteenth century,
The Imitation of Christ,
and try to follow the precepts laid down by its author, the German monk Thomas à Kempis.” Shots of horses being unhitched from the wagon and led into a stableyard, women in long dresses and modestly covered heads emerging from clapboard houses to greet their menfolk.

“Yet try as they might,” the commentary continued, “the elders of this isolated, inward-looking community have not been able to insulate themselves entirely from the outside world. In the last five years, a new militancy has grown up among younger members of the sect, who accuse their parents and grandparents of having become complacent—in their words, spiritually flabby.”