Lovers and Liars Trilogy (78 page)

“His tutor?”

“Former tutor, I should say. Party by the name of Dr. Anthony Knowles.”

The sergeant’s expression became dour: Gini had the impression that he and Knowles hadn’t exactly hit it off.

“I’ve heard of Knowles….”

“Who hasn’t?” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Twenty minutes after I saw him, we had his friend the chief constable on the phone. Telling me to get a move on. Don’t quote me….”

“I won’t quote you.”

“But they want this one sewn up nice and neat. I have to watch my p’s and q’s.”

Gini considered this. It surely could not be true. McMullen might have died on the rail line early Friday morning, but he could not have been dining in Christ Church the night before. That night was the night she and Pascal had talked to him; he had dropped them off in Oxford around nine-fifteen, then returned to his hideout above Hawthorne’s estate. So Knowles had lied to the police. Interesting, too, that Knowles should claim he heard the news item on the local radio station. She herself had tuned in to that station in the rental car she’d picked up at the Oxford station. It played an unremitting blast of rock music—she wouldn’t have expected that to be Knowles’s taste at all.

She pushed her hair back tiredly from her face. She knew she was neither thinking nor operating very well. She could hear Pascal’s voice at the back of her mind all the time. The pain of their parting was a physical ache. She could have located it exactly, have put her hand across her heart and said:
The pain is there.

“You want a cup of coffee, love?” The sergeant leaned forward. “You don’t look too well, you know.”

“No, no thank you. I’m fine.” She leaned forward. “So tell me, if McMullen dined at the college on Thursday night, what happened then?”

“According to Dr. Knowles, the dinner broke up late. He and McMullen went back to his rooms. They broke open a bottle of 1912 port or what have you and talked. Knowles pushed off to bed around three in the morning. When he woke at eleven, McMullen had gone. Some life, eh? I wouldn’t mind being one of those dons.”

“You mean he expected McMullen to be in college the next morning?”

“Oh, yes. This McMullen had been going through a difficult patch, apparently. He’d been staying there as Knowles’s guest for some while.”

“Really? At the college? For how long?”

The sergeant consulted his notebook. “Four days. In one of the college guest rooms. Same staircase as Dr. Knowles. He arrived there last Monday, and was due to leave Friday evening. Supposed to be going on from there to his parents’. They live in Shropshire. Near the border with Wales. But he’d obviously been planning something. They got a letter from him Friday morning. His father showed it to me. McMullen told them he couldn’t go on.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“General depression. No job. No woman. That kind of thing.” The sergeant shrugged.

Gini frowned. So Knowles had lied to the police—and an attempt had been made to suggest suicide as plausible. Yet why should McMullen want to kill himself now? Could the man she and Pascal had been speaking to that Thursday night have then deliberately killed himself only ten hours later? She did not believe that for an instant, not at all. She felt a sudden quickening excitement. She had been right, she thought: This death was not what it seemed. And if the police had accepted the idea that McMullen had been staying in Christ Church, they presumably knew nothing of the cottage in the woods. She leaned forward again.

“So I guess McMullen must have left all his belongings at Christ Church?”

“Not much.” The sergeant shrugged again. “One suitcase. Change of clothes.”

“You have a list of the belongings you found on his body? I’m interested, you know, in how you piece together someone’s ID. It might help my story….”

“A list. Yes.” The sergeant sighed. “Lists. Paperwork. Bumf. It never bloody well stops, pardon my French. Used to be forms in triplicate. It’s all computers now. I can let you have a copy, I suppose. No reason why not. Come down to the DI’s office now.”

In the office, the sergeant heaved his weight into a revolving chair, rummaged through some paperwork, and eventually found the printout he was looking for. He handed it across. “This article you’re doing”—he looked up at her—“modern police methods, that’s it?”

“Right.”

“Why pick this case? It’s routine, love. We could set you up with a nice little homicide.” He smiled. “Or drugs. The drug scene in Oxford is very active now. Only the other week—”

Gini interrupted him quickly. “No, no. My editor wants a routine case. That’s the whole point. So readers can understand daily policework. I wonder. I have a map here. Can you show me where it was exactly that he died?”

She passed her map across. It was a large-scale walkers’ ordnance survey, one inch to the mile. The sergeant scanned it for a second or two, then placed one large finger on a square ten miles to the southeast of the city. There, in an area with few villages, among open fields and woods, a solitary bridge took a minor road over the rail line.

“There,” he said. “See that bridge? Miles from bloody anywhere. It was right there.”

Gini refolded the map without comment. Not miles from anywhere exactly, but close, very close to where she had been two days before with Pascal.

Outside, in her rented car, she examined the map more closely, frowning and trying to remember the terrain. Yes, here was the church and the graveyard where she and Pascal kept watch. Here, in the valley below, was Hawthorne’s house. Here, on the far side of that valley, were the woods and the cottage where McMullen had holed up. And here—a tiny square—was the cottage itself, and the track McMullen had driven.

The track continued beyond the cottage. That continuation had been invisible in the dark, but on the map its route was clear. It wound down through the woods behind the cottage. Three miles farther on it joined a minor road. That junction was fifty yards from the bridge where McMullen died.

And not just close to the bridge either. She started the engine, stopped, checked the map one last time. On the map the boundaries of John Hawthorne’s estate were clear. McMullen had ostensibly met his death less than half a mile from the high stone wall of Hawthorne’s estate. And, of course, for a man obsessed with pointing the finger at Hawthorne, that was a very suggestive place to die.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly two. She just had time to call Anthony Knowles, and then make it to the rail line and to the cottage in the woods before the light failed.

She drove a short way, found a phone booth, and dialed Christ Church. A polite porter informed her that Dr. Knowles was unavailable. He had left that morning for a conference in Rome, and would be away for three days. No, he regretted, but they were not permitted to give out numbers.

Gini hung up the phone. She leaned her face against the cold glass of the door panels. She watched the traffic go past. It was beginning to rain again lightly. Just two days earlier she and Pascal had walked this way, on their arrival in Oxford, filling in time before that meeting at the Paradise Café. On the corner of the street over there, just there, Pascal had looked down at her and taken her hand. The pain was suddenly overwhelming. She felt it surge through her and clench at her heart. In her purse she had the number of the rented house in St. John’s Wood. Taking it out, her hands trembling, she picked up the phone and dialed.

By midday Pascal had completed his camera setups. Two telephoto lenses, their cameras mounted on tripods, one trained on the entrance steps to Hawthorne’s villa, the other on the windows to the rear. He had pushed all the furniture in the room against the wall so he could move fast and without hindrance in the window region, even in the dark. In addition to these, he had four other cameras, two loaded with monochrome, two with color, all to be hand-held.

As long as he was intent on these preparations, he could keep the pain at bay. The minute they were completed, it returned. He sat there, in that ugly, incongruous room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Why had he said those things? Why had he done those things? He buried his face in his hands. He felt filled with rage and anxiety and self-hate, he thought:
I am a fool.

He knew why he had acted as he did to some extent. He had been so desperate to prevent Gini from leaving alone that he was prepared to use almost any means to stop her. He had been convinced that if he loaded her choice in that way, he would prevent her going. The instant he realized she would
still
not be dissuaded, even if it meant ending their affair, he had been caught up in a hideous spiral of pain and anger and incomprehension and doubt. Jealousy of Hawthorne, that too; and continuing uncertainty as to what exactly could have happened between Hawthorne and Gini the previous evening. His mind had leapt from one crazy facile conclusion to another She could not love him; she was concealing something; she was not concealing something. …He rose to his feet with an angry exclamation and began to pace the room.

Pride, he thought: He was guilty of indulging wounded pride, of being obstinate, foolhardy, intemperate, incautious—and what was the result? He had thrown Gini a key.
Thrown
it, in a horrible, contemptuous way, not even given it to her, and spoken to her in that vile, cold, distanced way he had perfected in the years of his marriage. He had done all these things at a moment when all he truly wanted to do was take her in his arms—and then, not surprisingly, she had left. Walked out. She was now somewhere in Oxford. Alone. He couldn’t call her or contact her—and he knew, just knew, that she was every bit as proud and obstinate as he was, and so she would never contact him, she would not phone.

Fool, he said to himself. Fool, fool, fool. He stared around at the pink brocade, and suddenly it was unbearable to be there any longer. He slammed out of the house, went as far as the garden gate, then realized he had no bike, no car, no transportation. What if Gini were in trouble? What if she needed him? He slammed back into the house, called the nearest car rental company, stormed out again, remembered he had not switched on the answering machine, ran back in, stared at the telephone, and then started on a series of frantic calls. The Thames Valley police were helpful, but the sergeant dealing with this case was on his lunch break. No, they couldn’t say where he was, he wasn’t answering his office phone. Pascal then tried Christ Church. When he learned Dr. Knowles was away, his spirits rose. Perhaps that meant Gini would give up and leave Oxford. Maybe, after all, she would come here, that evening, on her return. He left an incoherent message with the porter, switched on the answering machine. He went straight to the car rental company and hired the fastest car they had available, a black two-door with a souped-up engine. Pascal hated it on sight. He drove it away from the garage toward the rented house steering fast and recklessly, slamming up through the gears. Then, deciding suddenly, he shot past the cul-de-sac entrance, did an illegal U-turn to the accompaniment of a cacophony of horns. He accelerated back the way he had come, slammed on the brakes, parked on a yellow line where parking was forbidden, got out of the car, and went into Regent’s Park. Avoiding the ambassador’s residence to his right, he turned left and took a path between bare plane trees, past the buildings of London Zoo and into the open spaces of the park itself. He came to a halt. He stared unseeingly at these acres of trees and grass. From behind him, where the zoo’s animal enclosures were, came one long, high-pitched cry. It could have been the cry of a bird or an animal. It was a prison-house cry, suggestive of hunger or desolation. It was not repeated. Pascal walked on.

He came to a halt, finally, some distance behind the ambassador’s residence. He could just see its roof through the trees, and beyond it the glittering dome, the minaret of the mosque. The sky was a clear, sharp blue-white. To look at it hurt his eyes.
My love,
Pascal thought; the pain was acute. He could locate it exactly: Heartache was not a generalized or a metaphoric term—that was where the actual pain actually was: in his heart.

He turned and walked back very fast to his car. He drove back to the rented house over-fast, and parked badly. If these actions drew attention to himself, he no longer cared. He could not understand at all what had possessed him to leave the house. Suppose Gini had called? It was one forty-five. The little red light on the answering machine was not blinking: So—Gini had not called. He felt a sense of absolute despair. He went upstairs and stared at his cameras. They failed to distract him or to console.

Christ,
he said out loud, and punched the wall. He ran downstairs to the telephone again, picked it up, and dialed the number of Gini’s apartment in Islington. He did this at precisely the second that Gini, in Oxford, dialed his line. As she was listening to the busy signal, Pascal was talking to the answering machine in her flat.

“Darling,” he said. “Call me. Please call me. Call me the second you return.”

He slammed the receiver down and tried to think. Maybe, when she returned to London, she would go to that safe cottage in Hampstead first to collect her things. He could see her now, doing just that, letting herself in with the key he’d thrown at her. With a groan he picked up the receiver and dialed the number there. He left the same message. Then he hung up. Then he decided it was a bad message and said all the wrong things. So he dialed both numbers again and added a longer corollary. “Gini, I love you. I love you with all my heart, darling. Call me the second you get home.”

He replaced the receiver. He was about to dial both numbers a third time, because he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to say he was sorry, forgotten to explain his remorse. He reached out his hand to the receiver, and at that second it rang.

Pascal snatched it up. He said
Gini
at exactly the same second that she said
Pascal.

As he did so, a black car with tinted glass turned into the cul-de-sac behind him. From where he stood, Pascal could just see it. It turned in, drove to the end, paused outside the gothic villa, then circled, drove out, and disappeared.