For a while, he moved his hands, open-palmed, as if exploring a parcel, then began taking hold of the towel here and there and scrubbing the skin beneath.
Bobby-May made a murmuring noise indicative of pleasure. Harton rubbed harder. The line of his mouth tightened, but it was still upturned at the corners. He breathed deeply, regularly, in the manner of an athlete.
The girl twisted this way and that within the towel cloak, as if to guide Harton’s ministrations to especially demanding parts of her body. He had begun to vary the scrubbing with a sort of kneading technique, hooking his fingers round the flesh and levering the rigid thumbs into it with a firmness that gradually increased to a degree not far short of ferocity.
Bobby-May was leaning now at an angle against the bathroom wall. She, too, was breathing deeply, but much more quickly than Harton. Every now and again, she stiffened into immobility for a second, then relaxed, gasping. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was a round hole in which the tongue made spasmodic appearance like some nervous pink bird.
Harton’s movements became less well co-ordinated and more brutal. He thrust a hand beneath the towel and clutched the girl’s thigh in an attempt to pull her off balance. She began to slide to the wet floor. Still she did not look at him although fingers rendered vice-like by countless hours of racquet-wielding had seized the invading hand and were conveying it to her mouth. The sudden bite made Harton cry out. His voice in pain was high and petulant, like a boy’s.
Only then, in response to the cry, did Bobby-May open her eyes. The corners of her mouth dimpled in a slow, sweet smile.
“You’ll thank me for that, Davy, when I come to you as a bride.”
“You vicious little cow! You needn’t think you can play games like that with me!” Boring one knee into her stomach, he forced her the rest of the way to the floor and tried to kneel astride her while he groped clumsily amidst the twisted towelling, seeking to pull it apart.
Bobby-May gave sign of neither distress nor alarm. She simply giggled.
“Cow! Bloody cow!” Harton punched wildly into the bundle he straddled. By ill luck, his fist connected with the point of the girl’s elbow. Pain streaked up his arm like a white-hot arrow.
The giggles were renewed.
Anger and nausea confused and soon incapacitated him, but for several minutes after Bobby-May had squirmed free and leaped, laughing like a tiddly schoolgirl, beyond his reach, he continued to belabour her with repetitive obscenities.
At last he got up from the floor, having seen that threads of blood were oozing from two punctures in the back of his right hand.
He stared at the wounds, put them under the tap, and sought a bottle of disinfectant and plasters in the cabinet above the wash-basin.
Bobby-May reappeared at the door. She was dressed.
“I’m off now, Davy. Mums will be waiting to go to church.”
Harton was still examining his hand. He spoke without looking away from it. “You murderous sodding bitch... I’ve probably got blood poisoning.”
Bobby-May’s eyes widened and glistened. “I’ll make up for everything when we’re married. It will be worth waiting for, Davy. It will, truly.”
“Christ, this is haemorrhaging. You bit into a sodding artery. Do you realise that?”
“ ’Bye, lamb.”
He raised his head abruptly. His face was dark with fury.
Bobby-May met his wild glare with mild and patient regard. “Poor Davy, you’re all upset. It’s probably the worry about Awful Julia.”
She came to him in four little running steps.
“Poor, silly Davy! Here—Bobo make better.”
Reluctantly, eyes half closed with apprehension, he let her take the hand and dry it with butterfly-light strokes of fresh cotton wool. She peeled one of the plaster strips and smoothed it over the skin. Harton started and drew a sharp intake of breath. She stood on the tips of her tennis shoes and without releasing his hand kissed him gently on the mouth. Finally, she drew the hand beneath her T-shirt and held it cupped for several seconds over first one breast, then the other.
“Better now? Advantage Davy!” She was down the stairs and opening the front door before Harton could think of anything else to say.
The boys of Flaxborough Grammar School would have been much intrigued by the nature of the gathering that Sunday evening in their headmaster’s big, dingy Edwardian sittingroom. In addition to Mr Clay himself, looking even more vigilant and authoritative than usual, there were present his married, and therefore fearfully old, daughter; a solicitor with a long neck, lots of hair in his nose, and huge black spectacles that he was always taking off and putting on again; and not one, but two, policemen in plain clothes—a detective inspector and a sergeant who clawed down into a notebook everything that the others said.
Julia, on Purbright’s insistence, had taken a small meal, despite her own declared disinclination to eat; and Mr Justin Scorpe had downed a couple of glasses of Mr Clay’s sherry in order to help put at ease, if not the company as a whole, at least Mr Scorpe.
The inspector sat at a big oval mahogany table in the middle of the room, with Love on his left. Facing them was Julia Harton. Mr Scorpe, his long, craggy head supported on three long, bony fingers in an attitude of meditation, sat on a chair upholstered in red velvet, a little apart from his client but within leaning distance of conference with her. He looked grave and immensely wise.
Mr Clay, very upright and prim-mouthed, was seated in the background: a silent supervisor, whose presence was evidenced by the glint of glasses in the shadows.
Purbright began by putting to Julia a string of formal questions concerning age, occupation, relationships, recent movements. He was gentle in manner and seemed regretful at offering such banal fare. Then he asked: “Were you acquainted, Mrs Harton, with a young man called Robert Digby Tring?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I should like us to be quite clear on this point, Mrs Harton. Robert Tring was a man in his early twenties who worked in your husband’s factory. People mostly called him Digger. He was a motor-cycling enthusiast. You never met him?”
“Never. Not knowingly, anyway.”
“So you can think of no circumstances in which you might have been photographed in the company of Robert Tring?”
“You mean specifically in his company, or as two people in a crowd?”
“Specifically,” said Purbright. “Just the pair of you.”
“As I said, I’ve never met the man.”
The inspector nodded, as if satisfied.
“Are you,” he asked, “interested in motor-cycles, Mrs Harton?”
She looked perplexed. “Certainly not. Should I be?”