“Have the police been to see you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “ They might have been to the flat. I haven’t been in much. I went to a party in Newcastle on Saturday night and stayed with friends in town. I didn’t get home until late last night. When exactly did she die?”
“Saturday night,” he said. “At about midnight.”
“So she died soon after I’d seen her,” she said. “Do the police know who killed her?”
He shrugged. “ They won’t tell me,” he said, “but there was a lot of ill feeling in the village about the new housing development.”
“I know,” she said. “I was at the residents’ meeting on Saturday afternoon. They were really angry.”
He looked at her sharply. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “ Why were you there? We’d decided not to cover the Brinkbonnie development because I couldn’t be objective.”
“I thought I could cover it objectively,” she said. “And if you didn’t want to run the story, someone else might.”
“We don’t work that way here,” he said. “I intend to run a paper with standards.”
“I’ve got standards!” she cried. Her face was flushed and he thought she looked like a moody teenager. He did not know how old she was. She had worked for him for five years and had seemed no younger then than she did now. He knew very little about what she did when she was on her own. She had kept her student friends and her social life seemed to consist of wild, alcoholic parties and evenings in smoky pubs.
“I thought it was a good story,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “ I didn’t mean to snap. I’m upset.” He looked at her. “She didn’t say anything that might help the police find out who killed her? They’ll want to talk to you, anyway.”
She shook her head. “We ended up talking about personal things,” she said. “She was so easy to confide in.”
“I’ll miss her,” he said, and returned to his desk to work.
They left the office together at five o’clock. He wondered if he should phone Stella to tell her that he was on his way home but decided against it. He had been half expecting her to ring him, to demand his presence back at the house, but there had been no call and that was a good sign. He pulled the glass door tightly shut behind them, then went down the stairs into the street. There was a smell of stale beer from the pub next door.
“Where are you off to tonight?” he asked, as he walked her to her car.
“Home,” she said bitterly. “ To an empty flat.”
He waited until she got into the Mini and revved it into life, then with grating and erratic lurches drove it away up the street. By now it was very cold. With the darkness the temperature had dropped. He thought for a moment of the plight of the swan on the river, trapped as the ice spread, then started quickly home, resisting the temptation to go into the Blue Anchor for a drink to warm him up first.
Chapter Twelve
As Mary Raven drove from the Express office to her flat, the depression that she had kept at bay with alcohol and frantic activity since Saturday night returned. Persistent and awkward questions repeated themselves in her mind, and she was very tired. She saw the lights of a large supermarket that stayed open late in the evening and realised she was hungry and that there was no food in the house. She turned sharply into the carpark. The motorist behind her hit his horn and she mouthed obscenities to him in her mirror.
She took a trolley and began to wander aimlessly down the aisles. The place was almost empty and the few shoppers she met intimidated her with their efficiency. They were well-dressed women on their way home from work with lists in their hands and a detailed map of the shop in their heads. They would have, she could tell, strong views on artificial additives, and she imagined that they looked at the contents of her trolley with disapproval. Defiantly she lifted pies, ready-cooked meals, and several tins of rice pudding from the shelves. What was the point in eating healthfully when you felt like dying? At the off-licence beyond the checkout she bought two bottles of wine and four cans of lager. Outside it was dark and the trolley had a wheel jammed. When she got into the car, she felt like crying.
She saw Max’s car, empty, parked outside her flat when she arrived there and read the licence plate by the street light with disbelief. She had been dreaming about Max for two days and had thought she would never see him again. The sight of the car, solid and familiar, made her think she had been a fool to be frightened. After all, she knew Max. He was a doctor, caring and gentle. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Her fears had been caused by lack of sleep and an overactive imagination.
One of the other tenants of the house had let him into the hall and he stood there by the ugly Victorian sideboard, clasping an armful of flowers. He looked worried and very serious and she thought he would put on a face like that when he was telling one of his patients that they had some dreadful illness.
“What are you doing here?” she asked roughly. She would not allow herself to seem pleased to see him. She could not forget the days of anxiety.
“I had to see you,” he said. “ Can’t you let me in?”
She had a carrier bag in each hand and set them on the floor while she felt in her jacket pocket for her keys. A can of lager rolled out and he stopped it with his foot and picked it up. She opened the door and led him into her living room. It smelled damp and stale. He took both bags from her in one hand and carried them through to the kitchen while she lit the gas fire and drew the curtains. He still held the flowers carefully in the other hand.
“What happened to your aunt?” she asked. She was standing with her back to the fire, but she felt very cold. “ I have to know.”
He set the flowers carefully on the scratched wooden table.
“You can’t think I had anything to do with that,” he said.
She shrugged. “ I don’t know what to think. On Saturday night I thought it was all over. I’d come to terms with that, and now you’re here. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“That I can’t do without you. I need you.”
“Don’t give me all that crap,” she said, but as the fire warmed her feet and fingers, she felt her resistance melting, too. She longed for the old elation and felt that after all it was still possible. Would it make any difference to her, she thought, if she found out he was a murderer? In her confusion and her pleasure in his company, she came to no conclusion.
“What about your wife?” she asked. “ Can you do without her?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not only that. I have responsibilities. There are the children, my work. And now there’s the problem of Alice.”
“So you’ve still not made a choice,” she said. “ You’re here, but you’ve still not decided.”
“How can I decide,” he cried. “I care for you both.”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “Really. It’s impossible.”
He moved away from the kitchen door and walked towards her. She knew she should be strong and tell him to go back to his bloody wife and his bloody kids, but she said nothing. He stood very close to her.
“I need more time,” he said quietly. “ You don’t understand. Things have changed. Someone saw you in the churchyard on Saturday night. It could be dangerous. If the police find out…”
“I know someone saw me,” she said. “I recognised him. It was that man from the meeting, Charlie Elliot. But don’t worry. He was drunk. He won’t remember anything, and if he does the police won’t believe him.”
“He saw you?” Max demanded. He was shocked. “ How could you let that happen?”
“I didn’t know then,” she said, “that it would be so important.”
“How can you say that?” he said, then seeing the surprise on her face, wanting to reassure her, he continued more reasonably: “No, of course not. How could you?”