Without Consent (20 page)

‘And I thought the whole thing was closed,' Connor muttered. He had half a mind to offer the visitor a drink. Not such a bad sort of man, for a copper, and besides, he wanted one himself. Late afternoon, work going downhill, hot as all hell, with scarcely an evening made in heaven stretching away in front of him; a drink seemed a good idea. Just a large one.

‘So it is closed,' Bailey said. ‘But you see, sir, there's an aspect of the sorry business which might, just might, impinge on another inquiry, quite separate. Now, it seemed like your wife was fantasizing about a caller in the afternoon when you came home to find her in the bath …'

‘I often do. She lives in there.'

‘Yes, sure, but not usually for so long? That afternoon, when you had to send for the doctor. Look, we know, of course, there's nothing in this rape allegation against yourself; monstrous, of course, but I'm working on the possibility she did have a caller. One who frightened her maybe. Shocked her, made her hysterical.'

Aemon was listening.

‘I can't think who she'd let in. Parish women. The priest, she loves the priest, for all he's a stern fellow to everyone but the undeserving poor.'

‘Salesman?' Bailey suggested. ‘Electrician? Plumber? Delivery man? Doctor?' he added as an afterthought.

Aemon shook his head. He was suddenly furiously defensive.

‘A doctor? Why the hell would she let in a doctor? There's nothing wrong with her, is there?'

‘Well,' said Bailey, looking at the clenched fists and wondering why the mention of a doctor tending his wife should touch so raw a nerve, ‘perhaps nothing obvious. Perhaps she was feeling ill?'

Aemon snorted. ‘Often says so, never is. Like a horse, she is.'

And, like an award-winning actress, faded, but never beyond a cue, the subject of their discussion wafted into the room. White towelling robe, an overpowering odour of roses, hair wrapped in a turban. Gloria Swanson, Bailey thought; Marlene Dietrich with a softer washed-out face and a bigger bosom. Never a Jamie Lee Curtis.

‘Did you call a doctor the other day, Brigid?' Aemon asked pleasantly, with only a hint of impatience. ‘You know, the day when we all went on our pleasant little outing to the police station,' he added bitterly.

She flinched, shook her head and smiled brilliantly.

‘We've our own doctor,' Aemon explained. ‘Sound fellow, sixty-four last birthday. Couldn't scare a cat.'

‘Have you ever been to see any other doctor, Mrs Connor?' Bailey asked her. She shook her head vehemently and spoke quickly in a childish voice.

‘Oh, no, I wouldn't do that.' Her face flushed scarlet. Her husband had poured her a large gin.

‘Ice?' he barked.

‘Oh, yes. A lot.'

The ice bucket was divinely old-fashioned, Bailey
noticed; almost enough in itself to turn any ordinary drink into a cocktail. Aemon downed his drink in one without, in the end, offering anything to Bailey; it put him into a vastly improved frame of mind.

‘Another doctor?' he chortled, stuck on the doctor theme. ‘You'll be accusing her of going on the pill next. She'd never do that. Not when we still have time for a son. Another doctor! Perish the thought! She won't even take her clothes off for me!'

Bailey, to his own shame, joined in with Aemon's laughter; let it travel over his face, make his body move while he tried at the same time to catch Mrs Connor's eye.

‘I only ask,' he explained, ‘because we seem to have a man in this area masquerading as an innocent visitor. Possibly even a delivery man, sometimes, bringing in flowers and chocolates. He's bothered a couple of other women, that's all, got them upset.'

Aemon was thoughtful. ‘You mean she needn't have been lying? She wasn't the only one being scared like that?'

‘I wouldn't have thought lying was in her nature, Mr Connor.'

‘Well, that's a relief. I hope you get the bastard.'

Aemon's eyes had strayed first to his watch and then to his wife.

Bailey saw her face, flushed and expressionless, as she passed an ornate mirror on her way to the window. A breeze moved the crystals of the chandelier making small clinking sounds. Mrs Connor leant against the window-frame looking downwards, intently, as if waiting for someone.

He saw scuffs on the glass, marks and streaks at odds with this daily-cleaned house.

She must have spent more time at the window today than she had in the bath.

God forbid he should be so happily married.

Ryan's blue folder. Two of them mentioning a doctor. Laughing it off.

‘If, with intent to commit an offence … a person does an act which is more than merely preparatory to the commission of the offence, he is guilty of attempting to commit the offence.

‘A person may be guilty of attempting to commit an offence (to which this section applies) even though the facts are such that the commission of the offence is impossible.'

D
erek could remember their words, Mum and Dad and all the rest, but most of all he could remember the sharp intakes of breath he could hear when fellow men clapped eyes on Shelley.

She's a cow, Derek. Everyone's told you she's a cow. Pardon my French, said his sister. Let me tell
you
something, he would say, she's a lovely gel, just needs a decent bloke. She's done well, Shelley. Oh yeah, sure, she likes a good time, but she works hard.

He had recited this chapter and verse until it almost rhymed in his head, always singling out from the memory bank those times when Shell was really astoundingly pleased to see him. Times on which his devotion was more
rewarded by her ten-minute enthusiasm than a starving pet with late-delivered food and everything forgiven. It was enough to nourish his dogged determination to keep by his side a bird as gorgeous and sometimes wanton as this. She could be a pain to live with, but they'd settled down, and oh, how his mates had envied him at first, whatever they said later. He could feel other men's envy like balm on the skin, massaging his fragile pride while they reappraised him.

‘What you looking at, Shell?'

‘Nothing,' she'd say, from her standpoint by the window, looking like a prisoner who would have knotted her bedsheets together in order to abseil out quicker than she could walk to the big front door. It was not such an imposing front door, either, simply double glazed and ugly, steel-framed, paintwork with condensation stains, and a notice politely requesting that it should be closed quietly. Most of the other residents favoured security. Senior citizens, Derek said politely, content to accede to their requests for errands and the mending of kettles. Past their sell-by date, said Shelley, with contempt.

And he was slowly, very slowly, discovering that his lady love, his dearest, his chosen partner in life, was a girl to whom kindness was not second nature, a bit of a bitch, in fact. Derek had resisted any such conclusion, squirrelled it away into the realm of non-being, just as he hid from her his ongoing terror of her infidelity. He dampened his exclusive passion for this elegant sulky creature into round-the-clock good-natured solicitude which he couldn't stop even when he knew it got on her nerves. Nothing was comparable to the fear that she might leave. Not only leave, but go elsewhere.

‘You're always looking out of that window, you,' he teased. ‘Anyone would think you liked the view.'

She yawned in reply. ‘Think I'll go round and see Kath,' she said.

‘I thought you weren't speaking to Kath.'

‘Well, I'll try. There's nothing good on the telly.'

Of course she was going round to Kath's while he went out for the evening shift. Like hell she was. She had all the nervous excitement and the faked yawns of a girl who was revelling in the idea of a cosy chat with a female pal and the pal's mother over a kitchen table. She was positively twitching at the prospect of drinking cocoa.

‘I think you ought to stay in,' he suggested. ‘Get an early night.'

‘Well, I might do that,' she said perkily.

His anger was always slow to build, easily hidden, only riled by lies. He knew what he was going to do and hated himself for doing it. He kissed her goodbye, went downstairs noisily and ignored the prohibition against slamming the door. Then he sat in the covered bus stop on the other side of the road and waited. Derek did not bother to crouch, disguise his presence, or wonder if she might see him. He knew she would fly out of the block without looking left or right, all memory of him eradicated with the application of her lipstick. He could imagine the possible destinations, too: The Wheatsheaf, The Crown, the wine bar by the canal. They were less glamorous than the second-rate West End clubs she really favoured, but still places where a girl could perch and get a drink or five for nothing and look around. The way she did on the rare occasions they were out together; she'd rather look at the
wall than at him. But then in bed, later, it was another matter. Exquisite pains and pleasures from a sometime hoyden, sometime thumb-sucking youngster, sweetly demanding before the tyranny of sulks. Only a child.

There she went, like an arrow, long legs gorgeous in the late evening sun, and all at once the anger went in a sudden flush of longing for her, compounded by shame that he should sink so low as to follow her. No, he told himself; go for a walk, have a drink, calm down and then go home; have a showdown later. The conclusion that she was an incorrigible and convincing liar had been a long time coming. In fact, it might never have arrived with such finality in his slow but precise mind if he had not seen her, watched her with incredulous attention, when he had followed her the night before; seen her in the amusement arcade opposite the station, talking with gestures to that man, Ryan. The one who had been round their flat a long time ago. The one who was supposed to have raped her, reduced her to that humbled and whimpering state of need in which Derek had so delighted. He did not understand.

He had no head for drink, but he tried. He came from the same kind of stock as Shelley's mum and dad, less contemptuous of flesh, equally suspicious of drink, suspicious of a good time … Never take your eye off the ball, lad, or someone will have your job; ask about the pension plan when you apply at seventeen; life is for building a wall against the kind of poverty which killed your granny. Of course he had to sort this out with Shelley; you don't let go of anything you have. Not your bricks and mortar and not your woman. Especially if she was pregnant with your child, even if she thought that was her own secret. Ah, yes,
he knew. And she didn't know that he had guessed about what she had done the last time. For all her cunning, she was lazy about the details, as careless with the receipt from that clinic as she was with the receipts for the clothes she hid, as if he had not built every hiding-place. The echoes of this contempt, as well as the drink, made him maudlin for himself and the lost child; more for himself, he had to admit. Even in the pub, he wept a little over his second pint and almost enjoyed the sensation. An older man came and sat next to him, one of the regulars Derek usually crossed the street to avoid, although at this juncture in the evening, when he should have been at work, when he should have been a man, not a wimp, he found he did not much mind.

‘You all right, old son?' It was said in a sedulous whisper, with all the solicitous secrecy of the confessional. Derek noted with rare observation that the face, younger on close inspection, was lit with concern. Derek rallied slightly, bought the drinks the occasion demanded, confirmed that, yes, he was fine thank you and they chatted about the weather in the time-honoured fashion of strangers keeping company, until Derek could no longer stand the smell of summer sweat which was days, if not weeks old, nor tolerate the sight of dirt-stained hands with brown claw-like nails, trembling round a glass. One and a half hours killed; he left with pleasant farewells to find the world darkening beyond the doors. The traffic was lighter, the air pleasant on his forehead, and the scent of diesel fumes almost a relief.

Then he waited indoors, half watching a long film, sipping the brandy kept for special occasions. Sipping,
dozing until hunger woke him as the credits rolled and he could not remember what it had all been about. Only that it was one in the morning and Shelley was not home. He blundered around, found Kath's number and phoned. Grumpy response. No, why should she be here? Let me sleep. Who were her friends, then? Real friends? Few enough. Giggly girls who did not last: none that he could count; none who lasted long. The thought chilled him. He was, really, all she had.

That was it; she was stuck somewhere and, oh Jesus Christ, that man Ryan trying to buy her off or something; she would always listen to a man and she was always worried about money. We've got all we need, Derek could hear himself saying, and her saying, all we need for what? He was cold and stiff and shrugging into a jacket, banging that damned outside door behind him before he was quite fully awake, panic rising like sap, full of renewed love. Silly cow! Why didn't she tell me? There was the echoing voice of a mate, saying, she don't tell you fuck all, that's for sure, not a woman like that. Ho ho ho. Fancy a dull boy like you thinking a bird like that would ever confide in your shell-like …

He was walking by now, shuffling at first and then, as became a man with a purpose, striding like someone with a preordained sense of direction, although one he made up as he went along. First The Wheatsheaf, eight minutes' walk, faintly surprised to find it shut and barred. There was the feeling that they should open to his knock, purely on account of the fact that he was now wide awake, but he did not rap on the windows because he could see that even the manager had gone. He strode up Goods Way, silent in
a misty heat, down past the ever-so-twee Essex-type yuppies bar above the fetid canal; slowing down now, realizing that his stride had no purpose and all but the juggernauts were well asleep. There was a train rumbling by in his dreams. The whole of this vibrating area had settled into a kind of brightly lit somnolence; nothing here much, and such as there was, on the way to somewhere else. The work overalls he had worn all evening made him hot. She would not be out at a time like this; she would be home by now.