Lovers and Liars Trilogy (79 page)

“You mean it?” Gini was saying. “I love you, Pascal. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t think for happiness. Also, I’m crying. I don’t know why. I started crying when the line was busy. I’m sorry, Pascal. I’m so sorry. You’re right. I am all those things you said I was….”

Pascal smiled. “So am I. Darling. I have to have you here with me. Come home.”

“The next direct train, the fast one, is at four-thirty. It gets to Paddington around five-forty. I’ll get a taxi from there. I’ll be with you by six, I swear.”

“Can’t you get an earlier train?”

“There’s no point, Pascal. The four-forty is an express. Besides, I’ve talked to the police and there
is
something odd about this. I’m just going to look at the place where he died,
if
he died—”

“If?” Pascal said sharply.

“I won’t explain now. But the police have been lied to. Pascal, I’ll just do that, then I’ll go straight to the station. I promise you I’ll catch that train.”

Pascal was about to burst out with another flood of arguments, another set of pleas. He stared at the wall and forced himself to remain silent. He said, and it cost him great effort to say that little, “You promise me, darling, you will take care?”

They talked on while Gini kept feeding coins into the slot. She told him about her conversation with the police sergeant, and she read him the list of items found on McMullen’s body. Pascal copied it down. Gini searched in her purse: She had run out of change.

“Darling,” she said. “I’ll have to go. I’m running out of money. It’ll get dark very soon. I’ll see you at six. That’s only three hours and a bit….”

“It’s three hours and a bit too long, Gini.” They talked a short while longer, then the call-time expired.

In Oxford, Gini walked out into an ordinary street which felt made in heaven. There was a made-in-heaven sky, and made-in-heaven rain. She lifted her face rapturously to the rain and let it wash her face.

In London, Pascal, dazed, stared out at an empty cul-de-sac, and a dazzling blue-white sky. He made himself some coffee, smoked several cigarettes, listened to silence and to joy.

Later, when he was calmer, he looked down the list Gini had read to him: a wallet, credit cards, keys, money, cigarettes, a lighter, a wristwatch, a handkerchief, a signet ring. He stared at this ordinary list, very little different from the contents of his own pockets, and he saw almost immediately that if these were the objects found on McMullen’s body, then something was badly wrong.

The place where McMullen had died was a bleak one. By the time Gini reached it, after losing her way twice, it was just past three, and the light was beginning to fail. She stood for a short while, shivering, on the bridge over the rail line. The area was deserted. She was surrounded by newly plowed fields. To her right was the track that led up to the back of McMullen’s cottage. It was rutted, visible for perhaps a half-mile, then it disappeared into a dark copse of pine, and an older stand of beech trees at the crest of the steep hill.

The rail lines below her, just as the police had said, ran as straight as a die. Rooks cawed. Two black crows were scavenging below on the line. The nearest house, an abandoned farm, was two miles farther back down the road. A fine and private place, she thought grimly, for a man to kill himself, or be killed.

She scrambled down the bank from the bridge to the rails. They had been fenced off once, but the wooden palings were rotten and broken down. Rusty barbed wire looped among dead brambles and nettle stalks. In front of her the tattered remnants of the plastic strips used to cordon off the area fluttered in the wind. At the edge of the lines there was a welter of rubbish—rusty cans, plastic bags, a bicycle wheel. Directly ahead of her, the stone chippings between the rails were stained a brownish color. She stared at this, then averted her eyes.

Suddenly, the rails thrummed with life; there was a loud palpitation in the air, a burst of deafening sound. Then, glaringly fast, came the lights. The train was on her in seconds. From three yards back she felt its rush and its suck. The suddenness frightened her. She reeled back with a cry, slipped, and fell. The train was past and gone before she lifted her head. The air rocked. From the distance came the banshee wail of the train’s hooter. The rooks rose up screeching from the oaks.

Shaken, she hauled herself to her feet. Slipping and scrambling on the muddy bank, she climbed back up to the bridge. She turned and looked at the track that led up to McMullen’s cottage. She thought she could get the car up it if she was careful. She was no more than twenty minutes from Oxford and the station: She just had time. She looked at the dark woods at the summit of the hill and hesitated. The light was now thickening. She had no great wish to venture up there in the gathering darkness, but she had not come this far to lose her nerve. She thought briefly of Hawthorne, the previous evening.
Don’t believe all the lies,
he had said.

She shook herself, ran back to her car, and eased it forward carefully onto the track. The going was easier, and quicker, than she had expected. She made it almost all the way to the summit. At this point, about sixty yards below the cottage itself, there was a clearing in the woods. The residue of the track was impassable. She cut her lights, switched off the engine, and climbed out of the car.

The silence was startling. The only sound was the whispering and creak of branches. Stepping quietly and cautiously, she edged her way up the overgrown track through the gloom.

She came out from the shelter of the trees into a small yard to the rear of the cottage. She stopped and listened. There were no lights, no sounds. She began to inch her way across the flagstones of the yard to the wall of the lean-to kitchen at the rear. There was a door here; she turned its handle, but it was locked. The boarded windows were impenetrable. Feeling her way along the walls, peering ahead of her into the shadows, she edged around to the front of the house.

She listened. Absolute silence. The wind had died down. She moved quietly to the front door and gave a gasp of fear and surprise. The door was unlocked. As she touched it, it swung open silently on well-oiled hinges. The room beyond was black. She could see nothing at all.

She had come here without a flashlight, she realized, and silently cursed. She stood on the brink of the room. From some distance beyond, across the track, a bough creaked, and there was a tiny scuffling noise. She froze, but there was no further sound. An animal, she told herself, some small animal, that’s all. She stepped into the room, shut the door behind her, pressed herself back against the wall, and reached for the light switch.

The light immediately steadied her. There was no one there. The room was exactly as before. She looked around it quickly: the sticks of furniture, the two paperback books, the pile of newspapers, the whisky bottle and glasses, the paraffin heater.

There was something wrong though, something inching its way forward from the back of her mind. The rucksack was gone, for one thing, but it was more than that. She looked around, and then she realized. The room was not cold. When they had come here before, it had been icy. With a low exclamation she moved quickly across the room. She touched the paraffin heater, and recoiled sharply. The metal was still warm.

She stood there rigid, her heart beating very fast. Someone had been here, and very recently too. She went silently to the kitchen. The container of gun oil Pascal had described was gone. She darted back into the main room, crossed to that newspaper stack, and picked up the topmost paper on the pile.

It was a local paper, the
Oxford Mail,
Friday’s edition.
Yesterday’s
edition. She stared at the date. Dead men did not buy newspapers. How did McMullen acquire that paper, bring it here, when at six on Friday morning he had been lying dead on the railroad track three miles away?

Her eyes moved slowly around the room. A bottle of Scotch, two paperbacks, three unwashed glasses, a still-warm paraffin stove; a lie to the police as to McMullen’s whereabouts the night before his death.

Was he dead—or was he alive?

Her mouth felt dry with fear. Her skin felt shivery.

The house was silent. She made herself do it. She crossed to the stairway door and eased up its latch. She stood for a moment, shivering, peering into the dark at the top of the stairs.

The stairs creaked as she mounted them. There was no banister, no light switch. They led straight into a single upstairs room. Above her head, high in the roof eaves, there was an unboarded skylight. She crept into the room and pressed her back against the wall. She waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom.

Gradually, she began to discern shapes from the patches of faint light and shadow. There was no furniture. Across the room, under the skylight, there was a makeshift bed—a strip of carpeting, and the hummocky outline of a sleeping bag. For one horrible instant she thought the bag had an occupant; her skin crawled. Then she realized it was empty. She was looking at crumples and folds of puffy material, no pillow, no sign of any clothes, but next to the bag there were some objects on the floor.

She knelt down and tried to identify them by feel. An empty tin candlestick, a box of matches…and a package of some kind. She felt the outline of this package. It was flat and stiff, a reinforced envelope about twelve inches by eight. It had been opened; she could feel the neat slit, made with a knife.

She held it out to the thin light coming from above, and could just see that there was something written on the envelope, but she could not make out the words. She was starting to shiver again. She listened to the silence fearfully. She could feel something inside the envelope, something stiff and smooth.

She felt around on the floorboards, felt under the sleeping bag, but she could find nothing concealed. Clutching the envelope, she made for the stairs.

In the light of the downstairs room she breathed more easily. She must hurry, hurry….She stared down at the envelope’s computer-printed address:
James McMullen, c/o Dr. Anthony Knowles, Christ Church, Oxford.
No stamp, so it must have been delivered by hand.

Inside there were photographic prints, masked by a sheet of thick white paper. When she saw what had been typed on the paper, she gave a low cry of astonishment. The signatory was John Hawthorne’s father; the message was brief, and to the point:
Mr. McMullen,
it read.
You have been making some very unwise allegations concerning blondes. I feel you should know the truth. These photographs were taken in the final three months of last year, in each case on the third Sunday of those months. Good-bye, Mr. McMullen: I shall not expect you to trouble this family again.

Gini gave a low cry; she stared at this message in confusion. She thought:
I was wrong, and Hawthorne lied.
She hesitated, unwilling to look at these pictures, then she lifted the covering letter aside. She had a sick premonition of what she might see, but she had not expected this, and she was not used to hardcore pornography. When she saw the three images, October, November, December, she gasped, and let them fall from her hand.

She bent down, and retrieved each month’s picture in turn. All three were in black and white. In all three the woman wore a black, tight-waisted corselet, which left her breasts almost bare. She wore long black gloves, black stockings, and black patent leather stiletto-heeled shoes. In all three pictures the woman was kneeling in front of a man. Each of the men was different, though all three were young, in their late teens or early twenties, and all had blond hair. Gini recognized none of the three. Each had his hands cuffed behind his back. Each of the men wore work clothes—coveralls or dirty jeans; each had the heavy muscular build of the manual laborer. One of them had scratch marks on his face. The November man had removed his shirt to reveal heavy arms covered in tattoos. In each of the three photographs the man’s fly was opened, and his penis was exposed.

In the first picture the woman held the man’s penis in her hand; in the second, she was sucking the man’s penis, her eyes closed; the third picture, and the worst, was what Gini knew was called a come shot in the trade. It had been taken the instant after the man’s orgasm. The woman’s uplifted face, black hair, and bared breasts were gluey with semen. Her expression was ecstatic: She appeared to be looking at someone else, perhaps the person who had taken these pictures; she was giving a glance of triumph and delight to someone not inside this frame.

Sickness welled in Gini’s stomach. She picked up the photographs and the letter and pushed them back in their envelope. She stood there, trembling with revulsion, and closed her eyes. The technical quality of the pictures was only too good, and there was no possible mistake. On the darkness of her retina she saw gender switch and a scenario reverse. It was a
man
who was handcuffed, a
man
who was blond. It was not John Hawthorne who liked sex with strangers once a month, it was his
wife.
The photographs were of Lise.

She felt an overpowering need, now, to be out of this house, to run back to her car, to catch that train and to rejoin Pascal. She crossed the room and switched out the light. She had to hurry, but she still had time.

She opened the door and peered into the darkness outside. The wind was stronger now, the moon rising like a splinter of silver. The stars were splashed across the heavens. Low, small tight clouds moved fast across the sky.

The light outside was deceptive, intermittent, giving the inanimate a deceptive wavering life. She stood on the threshold, suddenly afraid, watching shadows suggest shapes. She thought:
McMullen received those pictures; McMullen isn’t dead, he’s alive.
She took one step forward, and then she heard it: It might have been something, it might have been nothing. A brushing, whispering sound, the tiniest of noises, but she knew what it was. Someone else was out there, in the darkness to the side of the cottage, and something they were wearing, or carrying, had brushed against its wall.