What Men Say (3 page)

Loretta warmed to him. “Of course. Look, I know it's worrying, but she's always been healthy . . . I'll go and find her now.”

“Thanks, Loretta. John, hi, how're you doing?”

He was shaking hands with a latecomer, being introduced to his wife and small daughter; Loretta left them and walked slowly towards the house. One of her colleagues in the English department, a woman of about the same age as Bridget and pregnant with her first child, had spent weeks in hospital the previous summer after high blood pressure was diagnosed. She had eventually given birth to a healthy girl, returning to work so exhausted that Loretta had agreed to take over a couple of her courses. She did not enjoy marking twenty-nine essays on
The Prelude,
or rereading Trollope, but Judith was grateful and the extra money was handy. Loretta now realized she had paid little attention to the details of Judith's condition, seeing her illness as a practical problem which she happened to have the means to solve. It hardly qualified her as an expert on the complications of pregnancy, though she half remembered someone saying Judith's baby was terribly under-weight . . .

A furious barking broke out to her right. Loretta turned and saw a puppyish black Labrador making excited sallies towards the barn, stopping just short of the door and nervously backing away. A child was crying, its voice rising and falling in muffled sobs, but she could not see who was in distress or why.

“What's going on?” She appealed to Audrey Summers, who had appeared beside her.

“I don't know.” Audrey was tense and alert, standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of the adults milling
about in front of the barn. Loretta saw the Labrador's owner struggling with his dog, staggering backwards as it shook off his grasp and darted between the legs of the crowd. He tried to follow, calling the dog's name—“Teddy, Teddy”—and for a few seconds his voice drowned out the cries of the invisible child, now reduced to a series of thin, despairing wails.

Loretta gasped. The crying child was
inside
the barn—inside with the rusty spikes and unguarded machinery she had seen on her first visit, before the house was done up. Dreadful pictures rushed into her head, horror-film images of severed limbs and spouting arteries. Someone began to cry hysterically, and a man's voice shouted over and over again for a key.

“What on earth's going on?” Bridget touched her lightly on the arm, sounding both puzzled and amused. “Sounds like a riot at the very least.”

“There's a child—” Loretta's throat was dry. “One of the children's got into the barn, I don't know how.” Earlier in the afternoon, from her vantage point on the other side of the lawn, she had seen a heavy padlock hanging from the hasp.

“The window.” Audrey nodded in the direction of the farmyard, where a chair was lying on its back below a small, grimy window in the side of the barn.

“OK, everybody, stand back.” Sam strode past them, a bunch of keys in his hand. He fumbled for a moment, then lifted the padlock off. The door swung inward at his touch and he took a step forward, then fell back, his hand to his nose.

Stephen Kaplan demanded: “Christ, Sam, what d'you keep in there?” and the area in front of the barn began to clear as people coughed, gagged and retreated. Two boys emerged from the dark doorway, blinking in the brilliant afternoon light, then took to their heels in opposite
directions, the larger of the two swerving round Sam and disappearing round the corner into the farmyard. As he went, Loretta caught a glimpse of a familiar green T-shirt.

“Charlotte!” A woman in red hurried forward, holding out her arms to a small girl whose pale, tear-stained face was just visible round the door. She scooped her up, struggling with the child's absurd outfit, a voluminous taffeta creation which was torn in several places and beribboned with cobwebs.

“Is she hurt?” Audrey started towards the barn, then stopped and turned back to Loretta and Bridget with an expression of recognition and dawning horror. The smell reached them a second later, a sweet, sickening stench which brought bile into Loretta's throat and doubled Bridget over as though she had been punched in the stomach.

“It smells funny,” the little girl said suddenly, smoothing down her skirt and not looking at her mother. “It smells funny and the lady won't get up. She's gone a funny color and she won't get up.”

With impeccable timing the Labrador, who had taken advantage of the confusion to slip inside the barn, chose this moment to trot out with an object in his mouth. He paused, wagging his tail good-naturedly, then hurried past Loretta and Bridget in search of his master.

“Teddy, what have you—”

The dog presented his trophy, falling back on his haunches and beating his tail on the ground as he waited for congratulations that did not come. Instead, Bridget, who had taken a couple of steps towards him in order to get a better view, clutched at Loretta's arm and was promptly sick over a mauve hydrangea.

“Lawson, That's An Easy One,” Said The Inspector, writing it at the top of a new page. “That Nigerian lady who just went out, I had to get her to spell it twice. Even the Americans seem to have funny names—they all friends of yours?”

Loretta shook her head, having recognized the black woman as a postgraduate she had once met leaving Bridget's house in Woodstock Road. As for Americans, she could think of only two: Sam Becker, who hardly qualified as a funny name, and his friend from the computer company.

“Christopher Caesar?”

“Mmm, but that's not how he spells it, not like Julius. Here it is.” She flipped back a couple of pages. “C-I-S-A-R, with a squiggle over the
A
but he doesn't insist.” There was silence for a moment and Loretta's attention wandered, coming to rest on a garish painting over the stone mantelpiece. It was a female nude in the style of Egon Schiele, not an artist whose work Loretta cared for, and she wondered what it was doing in a room which was otherwise solidly traditional. Not Bridget's choice, she imagined, but that was true of
many objects at Thebes Farm. The deep-red walls of the dining room, the polished oval table at which she and the Inspector were sitting, were a far cry from the comfortable chaos she was used to at Bridget's old house; there was no place here for her shabby Habitat sofas and rickety gateleg table. Loretta saw that someone had left a clear plastic beaker on a corner of the gleaming mahogany, where a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight lent it a transient elegance. It was the only indication that there had ever been a house-warming party, that Bridget and Sam's friends had toured the house in twos and threes and filled it with admiring comments.

“Address?”

Loretta reluctantly turned her gaze back to the Inspector, whose name she had already forgotten. “Sorry, I've no idea.”

“What?”

She flushed as she realized her mistake. “I thought you meant—” She shook her head, fiddling with her hair to hide her confusion. “I'm sorry, I thought you were still talking about Christopher Cae—Cisar.” She stumbled over the name, adjusting the spelling in her head. “Southmoor Road. I live in Southmoor Road.” She gave the number.

“Is that the canal side?”

“Yes. You turn right out of Southmoor Place and it's on the left.”

“I must've gone past the end of your garden a couple of weeks ago. Funny thing, I've lived in Oxford for years and I'd never been on the canal before. You ever been to that pub at Thrupp? The Jolly Boatman, is that what it's called?”

“There are two,” Loretta said tiredly. “The Jolly Boatman's the one you come to first, then there's the Boat.” She had left Bridget lying on her bed, hardly
paler than she was when the party began but visibly weakened by the prolonged bout of vomiting which followed the discovery of the body. Audrey Summers had volunteered to stay with her while Loretta was interviewed, and Sam had promised to look in whenever he could escape from the bald man in glasses who appeared to be in charge of the police operation, but Loretta was anxious to return to Bridget's bedside. She doubted whether shock could bring on a miscarriage in an otherwise healthy woman, any more than catching sight of a hare could produce a child with a harelip, but Bridget's blood pressure wasn't normal to start with.

“Well, I suppose we'd better get on with it.” The Inspector patted her short red hair, sounding almost apologetic, and Loretta realized that the digression about the canal had been intended to make her relax. “This is just preliminary stuff,” the woman went on, chatty and reassuring. “Getting everyone's name and address and phone number, and where they were when she was found. Any idea who she is?”

“Me?” Loretta was astounded. “Good God, no. I mean, it never even occurred to me.”

“You have a look at her?”

Loretta gave an emphatic shake of her head.

“Very wise. Wish I could say the same about the rest of them, trampling all over the crime scene . . . You'd think they'd have more sense, being dons and all that.” A crisp note of disapproval had entered her voice.

Loretta said nothing, aware that the antagonism of the police towards students celebrating the end of finals with showers of champagne in the city streets lasted well beyond the end of the summer term and extended to anyone connected to the university, no matter how elderly or respectable.

“So you were where, when she was found?”

“I was on my way to the house, looking for Bridget—Dr. Bennett.” Loretta had given up using her own Ph.D. in a city where higher degrees were as common as personal stereos, and Bridget almost never called her-self Dr. Bennett, but it was one way of avoiding the Ms.-Mrs.-Miss tangle. She described the sequence of events as she remembered it, ending with the child's deceptively innocent announcement: “The next thing I knew she was saying—”

“This is the little girl, the one in the blue dress? Charlotte Patterson?”

“Yes. Something like—she won't get up, the lady won't get up.”

“And you thought—what did you think?”

“I don't know, because that was when the dog—” Loretta pulled a face. “Bridget started throwing up and I was trying to get her into the house, I was scared . . .” She shrugged, embarrassed, not wanting to admit that for a moment she had half expected a revenant to stumble into their midst. “It was a bit like a horror film,” she added, attempting to defuse the memory, “you know, one of those Coen Brothers things. I do remember someone coming out of the barn and saying there's a body, so then I . . .”

She paused, unsure whether any of this was relevant, and took silence for assent. “I was sort of holding Bridget, she was crying as well as being sick, and I just dragged her into the house. Audrey was with me, Audrey Summers, and we were halfway up the stairs when someone came and said could she look at the body—she's a GP, not that she could do much . . . I got Bridget onto the bed and went to the bathroom for a towel . . . I was alone with her for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, then Sam came upstairs and said Audrey had gone to get her—that thing for measuring blood-pressure—from
her car. He stayed with Bridget and I came down to make some tea.”

“So you can't really be more specific about who did what in the garden from the moment the dog ran out of the barn?”

“No. Sorry. It was very confused.”

“Well.” The Inspector sighed and put down her pen. “It's not as if there's a shortage of witnesses, quite the opposite.” She pulled back the cuff of her silky gray shirt and examined her watch.

Loretta said hopefully: “Is that all?”

“For now. Someone'11 be round in the next day or two to take a proper statement. Oh—I haven't got your phone number.”

Loretta gave it, adding: “I'm out quite a lot, I use the English-faculty library and the Bodleian, but there's an answering machine.” She stood up, as did the Inspector.

“I'll look out for you next time I come past your garden. Go on the canal much, do you?”

“Not this year. I used to have a boat but the wood was rotten and it sort of fell apart.” Loretta edged towards the door, not wanting to get involved in more small talk. “Shall I—who do you want to see next?”

“Dudley's got a list—the Incredible Hulk who brought you in.” The Inspector smiled, inviting Loretta to share in this small joke at the expense of a junior officer, but she was already thinking about something else.

'There is one thing,” she added, fiddling with the door handle. “I assume it's all right for Bridget to stay with me tonight? I've talked to Sam and we both thought it was a good idea to get her away from . . . from all this.” She gestured vaguely through the window, where a WPC was conferring in a low voice with someone out of vision. “I know you've got a job to do
but she's in a state of collapse . . . I gather Dr. Summers has talked to—to someone about interviewing her tomorrow.”

The Inspector pursed her lips. “So I've been told. I'll make a note we can get Dr. Bennett on your number. We don't want anyone thinking she's disappeared, do we?” She came round the table, her high heels clicking on the stone floor, and the expression of official disapproval cleared from her face. “You're very wise, actually,” she said in her previous confidential tone, “because the press are going to love this one.”

“The press? Oh,
God
” This was an aspect of the affair that had not occurred to Loretta, but she realized that a police press officer was probably briefing journalists at this very moment. Her ex-husband, John Tracey, had been a reporter on a south London newspaper in the early days of their marriage, and their evenings were frequently wrecked by his routine calls to the local police, ambulance station and fire brigade. “Anything for us?” he used to ask, assuming a chummy, all-boys-together tone which made Loretta cringe. Five minutes later he would be on the trail of a story, smiling apologetically as he pulled on his raincoat, and she would be lucky to see him again before she went to bed.