But no matter her story, they hadn’t believed her. She could see it in their faces. And who could blame them? Why would anyone run across Coe Fen in the fog instead of dashing back the way she’d come? Why would someone who had just found a body tear by her own car and sprint to the police station instead of simply driving there? It didn’t make sense. She knew that very well. And so did they.
Which went far to explain why the Bentley was still parked in front of her house. The police officers themselves were not in sight. They’d be questioning her neighbours, verifying her story.
Don’t think of it, Sarah.
She forced herself away from the window and went back to the studio. On a table near the door, her answering machine stood, blinking to announce a message on the tape. She stared at it for a moment before she remembered having heard the phone ringing while she was talking to the police. She pressed the button to play.
“Sarah. Darling. I’ve got to see you. I know I have no right to ask. You’ve not forgiven me. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’ll never deserve it. But I need to see you. I need to talk to you. You’re the only one who knows me completely, who understands, who has the compassion and tenderness and…” He began to weep. “I was parked in front of your house most of Sunday evening. I could see you through the window. And I…Monday I came by but I didn’t have the courage to come to the door. And now…Sarah. Please. Elena’s been murdered. Please see me. Please. Phone me at the college. Leave a message. I’ll do anything. Please see me. I beg you. I need you, Sarah.”
Numbly, she listened as the unit switched itself off. Feel something, she told herself. But nothing stirred in her heart. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and bit on it, hard. And then a second time and a third and a fourth until she tasted the vague salinity of her blood rather than the chalk and lotion of her skin. She forced a memory forward. Something, anything. It didn’t matter what. It merely had to suffice as a smokescreen to keep her mind occupied with thoughts she could bear to face.
Douglas Hampson, her foster brother, seventeen years old. Wanting him to notice her. Wanting him to talk to her. Wanting him. That musty shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden in King’s Lynn where even the smell from the sea couldn’t supplant the odours of compost, mulch, and manure. But they hadn’t cared, had they? She, desperate for an indication of someone’s approval and affection. He, eager to do it because he was seventeen and randy and if he returned from one more school holiday without having had a good roger to talk about with his mates he’d never live it down.
They’d chosen a day when the sun beat down on the streets and the pavements and most especially on the old tin roof of that garden shed. He’d kissed her with his tongue and as she wondered if this was what people called making love-because she was only twelve and although she should have known at least something about what men and women actually did with those parts of their bodies that were so different from each other’s, she didn’t at all-he grappled first with her shorts, then with her knickers and all the time he breathed like a dog who’s had a good run.
It was over quickly. He was hard and hot and she wasn’t ready, so there was nothing in it for her but blood, suffocation, and searing pain. And Douglas stifling a groan when he came.
He stood up immediately afterwards, cleaning himself on her shorts and tossing them back to her. He zipped his jeans and said, “This place smells like a toilet. I’ve got to get out of here.” And out he went.
He didn’t answer her letters. He responded with silence when she phoned the school and wept out a tedious declaration of her love. Of course, she hadn’t loved him at all. But she had to believe that she did. For nothing else excused that mindless invasion of her body which she had allowed without protest on that summer afternoon.
In her studio, Sarah moved away from the answering machine. For a smokescreen memory, she couldn’t have chosen better than to conjure Douglas Hampson up out of the pit. He wanted her now. Forty-four years old, twenty years married, an insurance adjuster well on his way into midlife crisis, he wanted her now.
Come on, Sarah, he would say when they met for lunch as they often did. I can’t just sit here and look at you and pretend I don’t want you. Come on. Let’s do it.
We’re friends, she’d respond. You’re my brother, Doug.
Bugger the brother business. You didn’t think about that once.
And she would smile at him fondly- because she was fond of him now-and not try to explain what that once had cost her.
It was not enough-the memory of Douglas. In spite of herself, she moved across the studio to the covered easel and gazed at the portrait she’d begun all those months ago to act as companion piece to the other. She’d intended it as a Christmas present for him. She hadn’t yet known there would be no Christmas.
He was leaning forward as she so often had seen him, one elbow on his knee, his spectacles dangling from his fingers. His face was lit with the zeal which always came upon him when he talked about art. His head cocked to one side, himself caught in the act of arguing a fine point of composition, he looked boyish and happy, a man living fully for the fi rst time in his life.
He wore no three-piece suit but a paint-splattered work shirt with half the collar turned up and a rip in the cuff. And as often as not when she stood close in front of him to study the way the light hit his hair, he’d reach out and pull her to him and laugh at her protest which wasn’t much of a protest and hold her in his arms. His mouth on her neck and his hands on her breasts and the painting forgotten in the shedding of clothes. And the way he looked at her, beautifying her body, every moment of the act his eyes upon hers. And his voice that whisper oh my god my dear love…
Sarah steeled herself against the force of the memory and made herself evaluate the painting as a simple piece of art. She thought about finishing it, dwelling on the idea of a possible exhibition and of finding a way to put paint to canvas and making it mean something beyond a neophyte’s obedient exercise in technique. She could do it, after all. She was a painter.
She reached towards the easel. Her hands were shaking. She drew them back, fists clenched into balls.
Even if she filled her mind with a dozen other thoughts, her body still betrayed her. At the end of everything, it would neither avoid nor deny.
She looked back at the answering machine, heard his voice and his plea.
But her hands still trembled. Her legs felt hollow.
And her mind had to accept what her body was telling her. There are things far worse than finding a dead body.
8
Lynley was just tucking into his shepherd’s pie when Sergeant Havers came into the pub. The temperature had begun to fall outside and the wind to rise, and Havers had reacted to the weather accordingly, wrapping one of her scarves three times round her head and pulling up the other to cover her mouth and nose. She looked like a bandit from Iceland.
She paused in the doorway, eyes sweeping over the considerable-and boisterous- lunchtime crowd seated beneath the collection of antique scythes, hoes, and pitchforks which decorated the pub walls. She nodded in Lynley’s direction when she saw him and went to the bar, where she divested herself of her outer garments, ordered her meal, and lit a cigarette. Tonic water in one hand and a bag of vinegar crisps in the other, she wove her way through the tables and joined him in the corner. Her cigarette dangled between her lips, growing ash.