“That's OK,” I said. I was standing leaning against one of the deep set windows in the flat, watching the lights of the traffic on the other side of the river, streaming across Greyhound Bridge towards Morecambe. The movement was soothing, hypnotic in its droning regularity.
I took another swig from a bottle of cloudy wheat beer I'd found as a pleasant surprise lurking in the salad drawer at the bottom of the fridge. “So, how's the black eye?”
“Oh, don't. Jacob's been giving me stick about that ever since, but it covers up all right. One of the boys on the crime desk wanted to interview me about my little fracas with Susie as a side story for the next issue, by the way,” she added with an audible grimace. “He not only wanted to get Photographic to take pictures of me without make-up, but said he'd get the art department to touch it up and make it look like a really worthwhile bruise. Cheeky bastards. I told them you were the one they should be talking to.”
I spat most of the mouthful of beer I'd been about to swallow back into the bottle. “Oh no,” I said, spluttering. “I can just see the way they'd write the story and I can quite do without that kind of publicity, thank you very much!”
“Oh come on, Charlie, it might give business a boost. After all, there should be hordes of women who want to learn self-defence after this. You'll be turning them away in their hundreds.”
The laughter in her voice was infectious and I couldn't help a smile, but kept my voice sober. “Oh yeah? All some tacky story in the local paper will do is throw down a challenge to all the punky kids in the area. Remember that boy last year?”
He'd been fourteen or so, cocky, sneering. He'd walked into one of my introductory classes unexpectedly armed with a small pocket knife. I hadn't moved quite fast enough and I still had the scar, a pale three-inch line across my ribcage that didn't tan well in the summer.
“Oh,” Clare said, suddenly becoming serious. “Yes, I do. Sorry, Charlie, I wasn't thinking.” She was sounding subdued again.
“Don't worry about it. And don't dwell on this whole thing, either. It sounds heartless to say it, but people do stupid things every day and get away with it. Susie was just plain unlucky.”
How many times did I teach my students how to avoid making themselves easy targets? Don't walk home alone at night. Don't take short cuts. It seemed so obvious to me that I found myself unsympathetic towards anyone who didn't follow the simple rules. Some people seemed almost to have a death-wish.
Rape is one of those life-changing experiences that you never entirely recover from, you never really get over. You put it behind you, and you try to move on, but it will always be there, colouring your thoughts and actions. Like a big mental and emotional scar.
If it's touched you personally, you look at other people taking risks with a sense of anger, as though they're belittling your own experience. Like a cancer victim watching people casually smoking. If I could have done anything to avoid having been attacked, I would have done it.
“I don't care how stupid she was. Nobody deserves to die that way,” Clare said now, with a touch of belligerence. “What he did to her – it just makes me feel sick to my stomach.”
“They must have told you more than they told me, then,” I observed. “The police wouldn't do more than say it was a murder enquiry.”
“I talked to the girl on the crime desk at work,” Clare admitted. Although she was only in accounts, Clare's always seemed to be very pally with most of the editorial staff at the paper. “She knows all the gen, but they're not allowed to publish half of it. The police want to hold back as much as possible to try and trap the killer. They don't want a copy cat, either, which doesn't really bear thinking about.” I could almost hear her delicate shudder.
“Can you find out some more of the details for me?” I asked. I'd already had twenty questions from Ailsa. My pupils were bound to talk about the Susie Hollins murder, too. Bound to ask me if I really thought my theories could help them to avoid meeting a similar fate. Until I knew what had happened to Susie, I couldn't answer that. Students get very nervous at unanswered questions. She hesitated.
“Clare,” I said dryly, “I'm hardly likely to go to print in the rival freesheet with it, now am I?”
“OK, I'll ask,” she said, “but I can't guarantee she'll tell me more than she has already.”
She agreed to give me a call later on in the week and invited me round for a meal the following weekend. I rang off with a feeling of unease that I couldn't shift. And although Jacob makes curries that strip the enamel off your teeth, it had nothing to do with the prospect of his cooking, either.
***
The sense of foreboding still hadn't gone by the time Sam arrived. He turned up so exactly on the dot of eight-thirty that he must have been waiting outside the door, one finger hovering above the doorbell, eyes on his watch.
I answered the door to be met by a big smile and a waft of expensive aftershave. I always find that strange on someone who obviously doesn't own a razor. The lower half of Sam's face is covered by a straggly anarchist's beard. He sauntered in, the only way you can walk when you're wearing cowboy boots, in a pair of black Wranglers and a bike jacket. “Hi,” he said, dumping his battered AGV helmet on a chair and shaking a box of computer disks at me. “Lead me to your computer.”
“Hi Sam, I've put it on the desk. Help yourself.” I offered coffee and went to see to the machine, which was down to the last nutty dregs in the bottom of the pot. I like coffee that way, but it's the sort of thing other people tend to tip into plant pots when they think I'm not looking. That can be a real pain when you consider I don't have any pot plants.
I gave up and flicked on the kettle. When I came back Sam had opened up the lap-top and was pondering the message on the screen. He'd put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses for close work and his long eyelashes brushed against the lenses. Most women would kill for them.
“We need a password. I don't suppose we know anything about the guy who owned this, do we?” he asked. I shook my head. I wasn't about to tell Sam that the only thing I knew about the previous owner was that he was a weirdo. “Pity. People usually use something obvious like their date of birth, or their dog's name as a password.”
“Fido?” I suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “In this case, it has to be something with seven letters,” he said.
“How about if you spell it, P-h-i-d-e-a-u?” I got a dark look. The kettle clicked off and I retreated to pour water on the instant coffee.
“I've tried a few obvious ones, like ‘let-me-in’, but I think we'll try a more lateral approach,” Sam said when I returned. He linked his hands together and cracked his fingers out straight in front of him. It made me wince.
He picked out a disk, switched the machine off and slid it into the drive slot before switching back on again, holding down a number of keys as he did so. The lap-top whirred and hummed again, then presented him with an “A” and a flashing block at the top left hand corner of the screen.
“Way to go,” I said, impressed.
“Thank you for your adoration, but we're not there yet,” Sam said, darting me a quick grin over his shoulder. “That's just logged me on to the floppy disk drive.” His hands flew over the keys with the sureness of a touch-typist. He had long slender fingers, spoilt only by the fact that he bit his nails. “I have a little program here that will keep bombarding it with seven-letter words until we hit the right one. All I have to do now is let it get to work.”
He leant back in his chair, looking smug and reaching for his coffee cup. We talked about something and nothing while his program ran, making the little computer buzz and hum to itself. Sam might have sounded confident, but I noticed he kept one eye on the screen all the time.