Now she was working on “Rapunzel” and her preliminary sketches showed the young girl – another firstborn taken from her true parents – letting her long blond hair down from the tower where she was held captive by a witch. Another happy ending, with the witch being devoured by a wolf, except for her talon-like hands and feet, which it spat out to be eaten by worms and beetles.
She was just trying to get the rope of hair and the angle of Rapunzel’s head right, so that it would at least look as if she might be able support the prince’s weight, when the telephone rang.
Maggie picked up the studio extension. “Yes?”
“Margaret Forrest?” It was a woman’s voice. “Am I speaking to Margaret Forrest?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Is that you, Margaret? My name’s Lorraine Temple. You don’t know me.”
“What do you want?”
“I understand that it was you who dialed in the emergency call on The Hill yesterday morning? A domestic disturbance.”
“Who are you? Are you a reporter?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? Yes, I write for the Post.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you. Go away.”
“Look, I’m just down the street, Margaret. I’m calling on my mobile. The police won’t let me near your house, so I wondered if you’d care to meet me for a drink or something. It’s almost lunch-time. There’s a nice pub-”
“I’ve nothing to say to you, Ms. Temple, so there’s no point in our meeting.”
“You did report a domestic disturbance at number thirty-five The Hill early yesterday morning, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but-”
“Then I have got the right person. What made you think it was a domestic?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you mean.”
“You heard noises, didn’t you? Raised voices? Breaking glass? A thud?”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m just wondering what made you jump to the conclusion that it was a domestic disturbance, that’s all. I mean, why couldn’t it have been someone grappling with a burglar, for example?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Oh, come on, Margaret. It’s Maggie, isn’t it? Can I call you Maggie?”
Maggie said nothing. She had no idea why she didn’t just hang up on Lorraine Temple.
“Look, Maggie,” Lorraine went on, “give me a break here. I’ve got my living to make. Were you a friend of Lucy Payne’s, is that it? Do you know something about her background? Something the rest of us don’t know?”
“I can’t talk to you anymore,” Maggie said, and then she did hang up. But something Lorraine Temple had said struck a chord, and she regretted doing so. Despite what Banks had told her, if she were to be Lucy’s friend, then the press might prove an ally, not an enemy. She might have to speak to them, to mobilize them in Lucy’s support. Public sympathy would be very important, and in that the media might be able to help her. Of course, all this depended on the approach the police took. If Banks believed what Maggie had told him about the abuse, and if Lucy confirmed it, as she would, then they would realize that she was more of a victim than anything else and just let her go as soon as she was well again.
Lorraine Temple was persistent enough to call back a couple of minutes later. “Come on, Maggie,” she said. “Where’s the harm?”
“All right,” said Maggie, “I’ll meet you for a drink. Ten minutes. I know the place you mean. It’s called The Woodcutter. At the bottom of The Hill, right?”
“Right. Ten minutes. I’ll be there.”
Maggie hung up. While she was still close to the phone, she took out the yellow pages and looked up a local florist. She arranged to have some flowers delivered to Lucy in her hospital bed, along with a note wishing her well.
Before she left, she had one last quick look at her sketch and noticed something curious about it. Rapunzel’s face. It wasn’t the all-purpose fairy-tale princess sort of face you saw in so many illustrations; it was individual, unique, something Maggie prided herself on. More than that, though, Rapunzel’s face, half-turned to the viewer, resembled Claire Toth’s, even down to the two spots on her chin. Frowning, Maggie picked up her rubber and erased them before she went off to meet Lorraine Temple from the Post.
Banks hated hospitals, hated everything about them, and he had done so ever since he’d had his tonsils out at the age of nine. He hated the smell of them, the colors of the walls, the echoing sounds, the doctors’ white coats and the uniforms the nurses wore, hated the beds, thermometers, syringes, stethoscopes, IVs, and the strange machines glimpsed behind half-open doors. Everything.
If truth be told, he had hated it all since well before the tonsil experience. When his brother, Roy, was born, Banks was five, seven years too young to be allowed inside a hospital at visiting time. His mother had some problems with the pregnancy – those unspecified adult problems that grown-ups always seemed to be whispering about – and spent an entire month there. Those were the days when they’d let you hang on to a bed that long. Banks was sent away to live with his aunt and uncle in Northampton and went to a new school for the whole period. He never settled in, and being the new boy, he had to stick up for himself against more than one bully.
He remembered his uncle driving him to the hospital to see his mother one dark, cold winter’s night, holding him up to the window – thank God she was on the ground floor – so he could wipe the frost off with his wool mitten and see her swollen shape halfway along the ward and wave to her. He felt so sad. It must be a horrible place, he remembered thinking, that would keep a mother from her son and make her sleep in a room full of strange people when she was so poorly.
The tonsillectomy had only confirmed what he already knew in the first place, and now he was older, hospitals still scared the shit out of him. He saw them as last resorts, places where one ends up, where one goes to die, and where the well-intentioned ministrations, the probing, pricking, slicing and all the various ectomies of medical science only postpone the inevitable, filling one’s last days on earth with torture, pain and fear. Banks was a veritable Philip Larkin when it came to hospitals, could think only of “the anesthetic from which none come round.”
Lucy Payne was under guard at Leeds General Infirmary, not far from where her husband lay in intensive care after emergency surgery to remove skull splinters from his brain. The PC sitting outside her room, a dog-eared Tom Clancy paperback on the chair beside him, reported no comings or goings other than hospital staff. It had been a quiet night, he said. Lucky for some, Banks thought as he entered the private room.
The doctor was inside waiting. She introduced herself as Dr. Landsberg. No first name. Banks didn’t want her there, but there was nothing he could do about it. Lucy Payne wasn’t under arrest, but she was under the doctor’s care.
“I’m afraid I can’t give you very long with my patient,” she said. “She has suffered an extremely traumatic experience, and she needs rest more than anything.”
Banks looked at the woman in the bed. Half her face, including one eye, was covered with bandages. The eye that he could see was the same shiny black as the ink he liked to use in his fountain pen. Her skin was pale and smooth, her raven’s-wing hair spread out over the pillow and sheets. He thought of Kimberley Myers’s body spread-eagled on the mattress. That had happened in Lucy Payne’s house, he reminded himself.