And that was another thing she was in two minds about. Touch Therapy. Sally had said she was still inhibited and being inhibited was a sign of emotional and sensational immaturity. Eva battled with her mixed feelings about the matter. On the one hand she didn’t want to be emotionally and sensationally immature and if the revulsion she felt lying naked in the arms of another woman was anything to go by and in Eva’s view the nastier a medicine tasted the more likely it was to do you good, then she was certainly improving her psycho-sexual behaviour pattern by leaps and bounds. On the other hand she wasn’t altogether convinced that Touch Therapy was quite nice. It was only by the application of considerable will-power that she overcame her objections to it and even so there was an undertow of doubt about the propriety of being touched quite so sensationally. It was all very puzzling and to cap it all she was on the Pill. Eva had objected very strongly and had pointed out that Henry and she had always wanted babies and she’d never had any but Sally had insisted.
‘Eva baby,’ she had said, ‘with Gaskell one just never knows. Sometimes he goes for months without so much as a twitch and then, bam, he comes all over the place. He’s totally undiscriminating.’
‘But I thought you said you had this big thing between you,’ Eva said.
‘Oh, sure. In a blue moon. Scientists sublimate and G just lives for plastic. And we wouldn’t want you to go back to Henry with G’s genes in your ovum, now would we?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Eva horrified at the thought and had taken the pill after breakfast before going through to the tiny galley to wash up. It was all so different from Transcendental Meditation and Pottery.
On deck Sally and Gaskell were still wrangling.
‘What the hell are you giving brainless boobs?’ Gaskell asked.
‘TT, Body Contact. Tactile Liberation,’ said Sally. ‘She’s sensually deprived’
‘She’s mentally deprived too. I’ve met some dummies in my time but this one is the dimwittiest. Anyway, I meant those pills she takes at breakfast.’
Sally smiled. ‘Oh those,’ she said.
‘Yes those. You blowing what little mind she’s got or something?’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got enough troubles without Moby Dick taking a trip.’
‘Oral contraceptives, baby, just the plain old Pill.’
‘Oral contraceptives? What the hell for? I wouldn’t touch her with a sterilised stirring rod.’
‘Gaskell, honey, you’re so naïve. For authenticity, pure authenticity. It makes my relationship with her so much more real, don’t you think. Like wearing a rubber on a dildo.’
Gaskell gaped at her. ‘Jesus, you don’t mean you’ve…’
‘Not yet. Long John Silver is still in his bag but one of these days when she’s a little more emancipated…’ She smiled wistfully over the bullrushes. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much us being stuck here. It gives us time, so much lovely time and you can look at your ducks…’
‘Waders,’ said Gaskell, ‘and we’re going to run up one hell of a bill at the Marina if we don’t get this boat back in time.’
‘Bill?’ said Sally. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t think we’re paying, for this hulk?’
‘But you hired her from the boatyard. I mean you’re not going to tell me you just took the boat,’ said Gaskell. ‘For Chrissake, that’s theft’
Sally laughed. ‘Honestly, G, you’re so moral. I mean, you’re inconsistent. You steal books from the library and chemicals from the lab but when it comes to boats you’re all up in the air.’
‘Books are different.’ said Gaskell hotly.
‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘books you don’t go to jail for. That’s what’s different. So you want to think I stole the boat, you go on thinking that.’
Gaskell took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t?’ he asked finally.
‘I borrowed it.’
‘Borrowed it? Who from?’
‘Schei.’
‘Scheimacher?’
‘That’s right. He said we could have it whenever we wanted it so we’ve got it.’
‘Does he know we’ve got it?’
Sally sighed. ‘Look, he’s in India isn’t he, currying sperm? So what does it matter what he knows? By the time he gets back we’ll be in the Land of the Free.’
‘Shit.’ said Gaskell wearily, ‘one of these days you’re going to land us in it up to the eyeballs.’
‘Gaskell honey, sometimes you bore me with your worrying so.’
‘Let me tell you something. You worry me with your goddam attitude to other people’s property.’
‘Property is theft.’
‘Oh sure. You just get the cops to see it that way when they catch up with you. The fuzz don’t go a ball on stealing in this country.’
The fuzz weren’t going much of a ball on the well-nourished body of a woman apparently murdered and buried under thirty feet and twenty tons of rapidly setting concrete. Barney had supplied the well-nourished bit. ‘She had big breasts too,’ he explained, in the seventh version of what he had seen. ‘And this hand reaching up–’
‘Yes, well we know all about the hand,’ said Inspector Flint. ‘We’ve been into all that before but this is the first time you’ve mentioned breasts.’
‘It was the hand that got me,’ said Barney. ‘I mean you don’t think of breasts in a situation like that.’
The Inspector turned to the foreman. ‘Did you notice the deceased’s breasts?’ he enquired. But the foreman just shook his head. He was past speech.’
‘So we’ve got a well-nourished woman…What age would you say?’
Barney scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Not old,’ he said finally. ‘Definitely not old.’
‘In her twenties?’
‘Could have been.’
‘In her thirties?’
Barney shrugged. There was something be was trying to recall. Something that had seemed odd at the time.
‘But definitely not in her forties?’
‘No.’ said Barney. ‘Younger than that.’ He said it rather hesitantly.
‘You’re not being very specific,’ said Inspector Flint.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Barney plaintively. ‘You see a woman down a dirty great hole with concrete sloshing down on top of her you don’t ask her her age.’
‘Quite. I realise that but if you could just think. Was there anything peculiar about her…’
‘Peculiar? Well, there was this hand see…’
Inspector Flint sighed. ‘I mean anything out of the ordinary about her appearance. Her hair for instance. What colour was it?’
Barney got it. ‘I knew there was something,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Her hair. It was crooked.’
‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it. You don’t dump a woman down a thirty-foot pile shaft without mussing up her hair in the process.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that. It was on sideways and flattened. Like she’d been hit.’
‘She probably had been hit. If what you, say about the wooden cover being in place is true, she didn’t go down there of her own volition. But you still can’t give any precise indication of her age?’
‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘bits of her looked young and bits didn’t. That’s all I know.’
‘Which bits?’ asked the Inspector, hoping to hell Barney wasn’t going to start on that hand again.
‘Well, her legs didn’t look right for her teats if you see what I mean.’ Inspector Flint didn’t. ‘They were all thin and crumpled-up like.’