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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Jim Meldrum series
- Sprache: Englisch
Escaping to America from the turmoil of her life back in Edinburgh, DI Jim Meldrum's daughter, Betty, is swept off her feet by a handsome man from back home. A whirlwind romance quickly culminates in marriage. But what are the secrets he is hiding? Handsome and rich, but still a mystery, has Betty married a monster? Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Jim Meldrum is feeling the strain of working on a high profile case. A businessman s wife is missing and, Jim suspects, has become a victim of foul play. As Meldrum investigates the businessman s past, he uncovers facts that seem to connect this case to a number of unsolved rapes.
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Seitenzahl: 346
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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THE STRANGER FROM HOME
FREDERIC LINDSAY
For
Eilidh
Contents
BOOK ONE
A STRANGER FROM HOME
CHAPTER ONE
After only three months in the United States, Betty Meldrum, who had chosen to revert to her maiden name, could tell herself that she had been lucky. She had a job, a place to stay and a friend. The Borders bookshop in the prosperous Washington suburb of Bethesda was a pleasant place and paid its assistants enough to get by. Not long after she’d started there, she’d seen an advertisement for a room in a house about twenty minutes away shared by three other women, all in their early thirties, one of whom, Lori Allingham, acted as landlady since her father owned the property. From the beginning, she and Lori, a sharp-featured blonde who caught the metro each day into the government agency where she worked as a secretary, had got on well, as much because of as despite their very different backgrounds.
Lori was from North Carolina and one lazy afternoon when the two of them had the house to themselves told how as a young journalist not long out of college she’d been sent to interview this old woman, one of the town’s founding aristocracy. ‘It was a beautiful house, but faded, a rich family in decline. They’d had a lot of servants, but she was reduced to one. The old lady went from one room to another as she talked to me, and in each one she rang the bell for the maid, who would turn up flustered every time because of course she’d gone to the room where the bell rang, but every time it was the one we’d just left. The maid was called Beauty. Looking at her, the old woman said to me, “Her family called her Beauty – a joke as it turns out.” Not long after, the old woman was killed in her bath – it was on the front page of the paper. The black maid had done it, and her name was Beauty. Can you believe that?’
On another afternoon they split a bottle of wine and Lori told of how she and her sister had found a pathology book in her grandfather’s library and pored over its horrors together. At fourteen, with grandpa asleep on the porch, she showed it to a boy cousin. ‘We looked at the pictures and got quieter and quieter until suddenly we were making out right there on the old leather couch.’
It was that same afternoon she’d invited Betty to her wedding, which was going to be held in the small town in Texas to which her parents had retired ten years earlier. ‘Lucky little me that they did. I was there on a visit, when I met Matt.’
As it happened by the time the big day arrived eight weeks later, their friendship had cooled perhaps because try as she might Betty couldn’t bring herself to share confidences about her own life. The invitation wasn’t rescinded, however, and since Betty by that time badly needed to get away somewhere, anywhere in fact, she went to the wedding.
CHAPTER TWO
‘In Texas,’ the man with the blue eyes said, ‘a vegetarian is someone who eats small steaks.’
She had been attracted by his accent, though he was a stranger like everyone else in the room.
‘You’re Scots,’ she said.
‘Don’t sound so surprised. We get everywhere. You should know that.’
‘I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Wilbur Conway.’ He said it in an American drawl and laughed at the expression on Betty’s face. ‘But you can call me Bobbie.’
‘Bobbie Conway?’
‘You can call me—’ He paused as if thinking. ‘Macleod.’
‘Bobbie Macleod? What is your name?’
‘Wilbur Conway – but I thought you didn’t like it.’
‘It doesn’t go with the accent.’
‘So call me Bobbie.’
She was slightly drunk, which wasn’t one of her vices, but she had plenty of excuses. The taxi had taken her to the wrong terminal at Baltimore-Washington and by the time she got to Concourse A/B and found the gate for Southwest Airlines she had been late, which meant inevitably that she’d been picked for a more onerous check before being allowed to board. As a result, she was separated from the others going to the wedding, which made no difference to them since none of them knew her but for her meant spending a long flight wedged between a fat man with a sweet body odour and a woman going to Texas to bury her son who’d been shot by a small-town sheriff. Bewildered as any European by the culture of the gun, the woman, a native New Yorker, kept explaining how her son was a student of physics who’d gone to Texas to visit a friend. ‘They went for a drink and had way too much. I’m told they were both high. But weren’t they entitled? They’d worked so hard, got their qualifications, they had the whole world at their feet. Outside the bar, this sheriff, he was only five foot high, started to shout at them and Danny jumped on his back. He was laughing when the little guy pulled his gun and shot him dead.’ It had been a long flight and at San Antonio the groom’s brothers who had volunteered to pick them up were late. That first night she’d slept badly in a hotel, wakening unrefreshed and lying for what seemed like hours listening to hot water pipes butting floor beams in the dark.
At the wedding rehearsal in the Baptist Church, which was the biggest in town, she spent time contemplating the banners interweaving the names of bride and groom hung behind the altar. At night they had dinner in a barn, one end still occupied by agricultural machinery, the other with living quarters two storeys high built against the end wall. Despite this, there was ample space left in the middle for tables to accommodate all the guests. Family and friends had done the catering, barbecued steak on paper plates the staple of the feast, though a fountain of chocolate also caught the eye. Afterwards, Betty was told, the older women would tidy up. Looking for something better to do, having in mind hen nights she’d gone to the night before weddings back home, she questioned the willowy blonde seated next to her who said, ‘You’d be welcome to come along if we go on a drag.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We get in our cars and drive around and—’
Interrupting, the woman on her other side, another friend of Lori’s dating back to first grade, laughed and explained, ‘We drive around and every time we see a flag we haul down the windows and yell Yee-haw!’ Since they were women in their thirties, Betty’s first thought was that they might be joking.
Sensing her hesitancy, the first woman said pleasantly, ‘Or we could toilet roll somebody’s house. That would be fun.’
When she learnt that the groom and his friends were going to The Mill – ‘You have to bring your own bottle but it’s a good old place, I’ve seen the Catholic priests there, I tell you those boys like their liquor’ – the choice between it and the drag was no contest. The place turned out to be noisy and crowded and the group she was with were friendly and made sure she had plenty to drink and, although if she had wanted to see a priest falling into sin there wasn’t one in sight, as consolation at some point she found herself talking to a tall man with a familiar accent and the bluest eyes she’d ever seen.
CHAPTER THREE
As he ate his meal with his fingers straight from the paper wrapping, Meldrum pondered on how long it was since he had actually relished a fish supper rather than stoically feeding scraps of fish and lengths of cooling chipped potato into his mouth. An old Italian had told him that fish suppers had never tasted the same since concerns for health had led to the replacement of lard for frying with vegetable oil. Since Italians in Scotland had always made the best fish suppers, he was prepared to believe it, though it was also possible that the ones he remembered had been enjoyed so much because he was young.
The ringing of the phone startled him. As he went over, he rubbed his face as if to squeeze the need for sleep out of it.
‘It’s about Betty,’ the woman’s voice said.
He hadn’t spoken but she’d known he was there and launched into the conversation without preamble. Some things didn’t change.
‘Carole?’
‘Yes, it’s me,’ she said impatiently, though they hadn’t spoken for months.
‘What about Betty? She’s not ill?’
‘She’s got married.’
‘What?’ His first reaction was disbelief, but his heart lurched all the same as it had done since his daughter was a child in need of protection.
‘It’s true. I didn’t believe it myself at first. She met someone in America, and they got married.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Oh, that’s such a policeman’s question.’ No, he thought, a man’s question, a father’s question. ‘His name’s Bobbie.’
‘She didn’t say what he did?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘That’s a good sign,’ he said mournfully, meaning the opposite.
‘Why won’t you trust her? She needs to be trusted. That’s why I just listened. I had questions, but I didn’t ask them. After all that’s happened she needs us to trust her. There’ll be time to find out more.’ He let the silence go on. At last, Carole said, ‘She only phoned last night.’
After his ex-wife hung up, he stood with the phone forgotten in his hand. The knowledge bruised him of how little he figured now in his daughter’s thoughts and feelings. They had been close once.
Back in his chair, he watched the traffic flowing from Princes Street down the broad artery of Leith Walk, its sea murmur punctuated every so often by the ululation of a police car or the lament of an ambulance. As he crumpled the fish supper wrapping and leant forward to put it in the wastebasket, he jostled the table and the picture frame fell over with a clatter.
He set it upright and rubbed a thumb over the undamaged glass. The picture had been taken before Betty married Sandy, before the young couple had a child who died as a toddler, before she’d had a one-night stand and got pregnant, before Sandy left her. She looked very young, laughing in the garden of the house they’d lived in as a family, standing beside her mother. But then Carole looked young as well, and as he stood behind the camera taking the picture he supposed so would he. Still married and happy, he and Carole would both have looked young. He laid the photo over again face down and stared out unseeingly at the Edinburgh night traffic until something flickered at the corner of his vision. He registered the image of a mouse scampering along by the skirting board just as it flickered out of sight under the sideboard. With a sigh, he fished the wrapping out of the basket, took it through to the kitchen and forced the greasy handful into the rubbish bin.
He started to pour water into the kettle and, bent over the sink, glanced down into the side street. As he was closing the tap, a figure emerged from the close that stood almost opposite his own. Hard to tell what caught his attention. Perhaps nothing more than the heavy cloth coat, which even from above had an expensive look. What was a man wearing that kind of coat doing coming out of that particular close? Although some of the closes were coming up in the world, as flats were refurbished and sold, the close opposite wasn’t one of them.
As the man made his way towards the main street, he passed the local pub where three youths loitered in the lit entrance. As he came level with them, he broke step and turned his head sharply, as if one had said something to him. Perhaps he said something in reply since as he stood all three began to gesture at him.
Watching, Meldrum shook his head. In this district at night, a stranger was stupid to respond to a challenge. Though the man stood head and shoulders above the tallest of the three, if they were carrying blades his height and breadth only made him a better target. There was something about the group, too, that suggested the youths were on some kind of high.
As the confrontation continued, Meldrum muttered aloud, ‘For God’s sake, man.’ Almost as if he had heard, the man made a gesture of dismissal and began to walk away. As he did, the tallest of the three followed for a couple of steps, head jutted forward, obviously mouthing off after him.
Whatever the excitement, it seemed to be over and Meldrum put the kettle on its base and switched it on. Giving a last glance, however, he was in time to see the man, who must have turned and come back very fast, lift the boy off his feet and hold him dangling like a puppet in the air before throwing him down on the pavement.
The fringe of smokers, who always gathered outside the pub since the smoking ban, turned from amused to agitated onlookers. At their shouts, people spilt out of the pub. Seemingly unflustered, the man walked half a dozen steps to where a car was pulling in at the kerb and climbed into the back. Next moment the car was gone, round the corner, slipping into the stream of traffic.
A few long strides took Meldrum back to the window in the front room that gave him a view of Leith Walk. He could see the car; it was held at the first set of lights but its number plate was hidden by the car behind it. A pair of binoculars was kept in the cupboard in the hall. He hurried out but took time to locate them, since they had hung there since a brief flirtation with birdwatching years before. The car was moving when he focused on it, spinning the wheel to get the sharpest image. By then it was almost at London Road and he lost his chance as it turned on to the roundabout and went out of sight.
By the time he’d walked back to the kitchen, a police constable had joined the crowd around the boy on the pavement. There was no point he decided in going down since there was nothing he could add to the testimony of those who had witnessed the incident. Shortly afterwards, an ambulance arrived with an attendant police car.
It was after eleven and a wave of tiredness overtook him. When he went to bed, however, he lay for a long time and his sleep was uneasy when it came at last. An angle as the crowd parted had given him a view of the boy just before he was lifted from the pavement. His legs had lain at an odd angle as if the ankles or knees had been snapped by the impact of being hurled down. An attack with fists and feet might have been as brutal, sudden, violent, but this assault had been in some odd way impersonal, an expression of contempt as much as anger.
Perhaps what was troubling him, Meldrum thought as he lay trying to sleep, wasn’t the attack alone but not going down to help. What would have been the point, though? He hadn’t got the number plate of the car, he hadn’t had a look at the man’s face; based on a view from above any account he might give of height and build could only be imperfect.
Forget it, I could pass him in the street and not recognise him, Meldrum decided, and fell asleep wondering if that was true.
CHAPTER FOUR
They were in the car. When it rains in Scotland, it can be serious business. An outburst drummed so hard on the roof that it swamped the end of her sentence.
‘Only a complete bastard would have—’
Barry Croft stared at the back of the driver’s head. Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about what Kevin heard. Kevin was loyal. Kevin was a wall. Big, broad. And thick.
Rachel Croft’s voice surfaced again, spraying venom like water from a swimmer’s hair.
‘…so angry. It’s not what you say, not the actual words.’
‘We agreed that we’d set out at eleven,’ he reminded her. ‘At eleven I’d my coat on and then I sat for half an hour. So I told you the time.’
‘It’s not what you say. It’s the tone you use. You know you’re criticising me. You make me feel worthless. You know what you’re doing.’
‘Telling you I didn’t mind if we were late? Saying it didn’t matter all that much?’
‘Why mention being late at all? I don’t think we’re going to be late. We’ve still got time.’
Wind shouldered the car over until it nudged the white line.
‘What a day,’ he said.
‘What?’ She packed the monosyllable with amazement at his obtuseness.
‘It’s not a day to be speeding, even in a car this size.’
‘Listen to yourself,’ she urged. ‘You’re doing it again. My blood pressure must be 190.’
‘You play a lot of tennis,’ he said. ‘You get coached. You’re pretty fit.’
She pulled her hand away as, reaching for her wrist, he laid two fingers on the taut flesh under her thumb to check the march of her pulse.
‘I can feel the blood pushing against the backs of my eyes,’ she said. ‘If I die, we’ll both know who’s to blame.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Phoenix was also in America. The thought amused her. Never mind country, it might have been a different continent. A dry continent. By contrast, she had been conscious of a moistness in the Washington air, a relic perhaps of the swamps on which it had been built. She remembered how Lori Allingham, one evening sitting in the porch of the Bethesda house, had jumped up and sprayed a mosquito that had found its way in through a hole in the wire mesh. That summer the mosquitoes, breeding in the capital’s forested spaces, were carrying Nile Fever. Here in Phoenix by contrast there were no pests; it was too hot even for flies.
‘When I first flew in here in the early Fifties,’ the man in the bookshop had told her, ‘I looked out of the plane and saw nothing but desert. Now you look out and the town is ringed with green. So many golf courses!’ When she nodded, he asked, ‘You saw them?’
‘We have a lot of golf courses at home,’ she said.
‘I know, I played on quite a few. We had our own bus and a Scots guy as a courier. Started in Troon and finished at St Andrews. The Old Course – the home of golf, isn’t that right? Played our last round on it, right near the end before we came home. If I hadn’t blown up on the last green—’ He shook his head. ‘I was a sore loser. I said to them, show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.’
He seemed to be a pleasant man and he’d offered her a job. It had been embarrassing having to go in next day and explain it had been a mistake. Her husband didn’t want her to work. Money isn’t a problem, Bobbie had said quietly. If I told my wife that, the manager said, she’d max out the credit cards. You hold on to that guy.
After she’d got over being upset, she’d told Bobbie about the manager’s holiday.
‘Of course, Scotland’s the home of golf,’ he said. ‘It rains all the time in Scotland.’
He’d taken her downstairs and plucked a flower from the bush that grew by the front door. Then he’d laid it at the edge of the step. ‘If no one disturbs it, you can come back next year and find it lying here. The shape will be different and it will have faded, but it’ll still be red. That’s how dry it is.’
Yet Phoenix was a green city. Teams of Mexican workmen tended the gardens round the apartment block, and down town every glass and concrete tower sat back from the street in a setting of lawns and fountains. ‘Back home in Scotland,’ Bobbie said to her, ‘even the best buildings are crowded together so you can’t see them. It’s the space here that makes the difference.’
‘You should get a job with the Tourist Board,’ she said, irritated without knowing why.
‘That’s why the Scots make good immigrants,’ he said. ‘We’re patriots of wherever we end up.’
Perhaps because of the spat about the job, perhaps she speculated because both of them had been upset by it, the rest of that day went on to be one of the best they’d had together.
They took the car to Camelback, parked under the ramada and set out to climb the hill. Late in the afternoon, it was hot, something over a hundred degrees, but three weeks in Phoenix had acclimatised her and they had bottles of water to sip as they climbed. It was a well-marked trail with plenty of people going up and down. When a lean elderly man passed them on the way up, not only going at a steady trot but pumping iron in both fists, she was impressed and then amused as Bobbie scowled and described him as an old goat. When they got to the top and looked out over the city, Bobbie slipped an arm around her waist. ‘Happy anniversary, Mrs Conway!’ They had been married for five weeks.
In the evening he took her for dinner to a resort hotel and they sipped drinks as they watched the guests on the tennis courts. ‘We’ll catch one of the tournaments,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen Greg Rusedski and Mark Philippousis and Tommy Haas at Scottsdale.’
‘I’d like that,’ she said, though she had never watched a game of professional tennis.
‘Venus Williams too, close up she’s got legs like a prizefighter. And the bald guy – stepping round the court like a wind-up toy with his scalp white from sun lotion – what’s his name again?’
She shook her head, and when he laughed she thought it was some kind of test he’d given her.
‘Agassi, that’s it. And we’ll go see the Diamondbacks. You ever seen a baseball game? You’ll enjoy it. Sit on the shady side and eat hot-dogs. It’s family entertainment – down in one corner they’ve got a swimming pool and people round it under big umbrellas eating ice cream. Only in America, like they say.’
Later they ate out on the terrace with the big stoves glowing though it was still warm and the tall lanterns shining more brightly as darkness fell.
Going in to their apartment block, she started giggling and told him it was at sight of the red flower lying in the corner of the step. ‘Only in Phoenix,’ she said. Through some oversight, the air conditioning wasn’t on in their bedroom and they stripped off the cover and lay naked on the bed. After they’d made love, they lay on their backs holding hands. He touched between her breasts and licked his finger tasting her sweat. She was happy, happy enough to spend the rest of her life with him, too happy to want to have any secrets.
‘Don’t worry,’ Bobbie whispered, one hand cupping her breast. ‘I won’t let you down about wee Tommy. I respected you for telling me about the baby.’
‘My husband—’
‘Must have been a bastard.’
‘He wasn’t.’ Thinking of Sandy something moved deep inside her, like the first intimation of pain to come or the stirring of a foetus.
‘In my book any man that deserts his wife when there’s a baby is a bastard.’
And then she said it, ‘But the baby wasn’t his.’
There was a long moment of silence, long enough for her to regret the words, and then he tightened his grip gently on her and whispered, ‘But he’ll be ours. We’ll send for him like I promised and he’ll be yours and mine.’
Lying open in the dark, she listened to his breathing slow into the steady rhythm of sleep. She had told him about wee Sandy, her oldest son, and how his illness and death had changed everything. But she hadn’t told him about her illness, how the world had grown dark and confused, hadn’t told him about the drugs or the patients smoking in the hospital corridor. She hadn’t told him of her private fight with despair when she finally got to come home or of the stranger she’d slept with for only one night.
So much to tell him, but he had accepted her and the baby without knowing any of it. She would tell him the rest soon. Not tomorrow, but soon. After all, they had plenty of time.
CHAPTER SIX
‘My father’s a policeman,’ she told him on impulse. She wanted him to know about her, she hoped in time he would know everything about her, just not today or all at once.
He stopped, suddenly, just like that, so the crowd had to part around them.
‘You’re full of surprises,’ he said.
He’d taken her to the mall at Scottsdale before and she had loved it, loved the hairdresser’s run by the two exotic brothers, loved the cool air flowing along the wide avenues under the glass roof, loved Saks, Fifth Avenue, names she knew from malls at home that were different here, bigger, sleeker, brighter, with tiny dresses in rows, like clothes for sexy children, the gross hamburger gobblers all somewhere else in another America. She even loved the smell of the air; though she wasn’t a greedy person, it smelt like money.
Afterwards they’d walked down into Scottsdale itself, abandoning the car, ignoring the bus. ‘Buses are for greasers and niggers,’ he’d said and, laughing at her shocked expression, ‘Just kidding. But let’s walk. It’s not far and the heat won’t bother us. We’re Scots – we’re tough, am I right?’
All the same, she was glad when they got down the hill and could walk in the comparative coolness of the streetwalk shades.
‘Let’s take the bus back to the mall,’ she said. ‘I’m not so tough.’
He took her hand and they looked in the windows of jewellery shops and went into crowded stores that sold Mexican carvings and Indian blankets. After a time they settled down at a table in the shade and drank beers, though alcohol was a bad idea in that heat and she was annoyed when he joked about it being OK since they were Scots after all. Enough with the Scots already! she exclaimed to herself like a Jewish momma, one of the voices she kept for her private thoughts.
‘How good is he?’ Bobbie asked.
‘Who?’
‘Your father.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not asking if he’s a churchgoer. How good a policeman is he?’
‘Pretty good, I think. He’s had his name in the papers.’
‘For what?’
‘Solving murders.’
‘He’s been a policeman for a long time?’
‘Ever since I can remember.’
‘What rank is he?’
‘He’s a detective inspector.’
He sipped at the long narrow glass. ‘He can’t be that good.’
She rose to the bait. ‘He hasn’t got the promotions he should have. I don’t know why. They’ve something against him. He never talks about it. Something that happened a long time ago. But he is good, believe me.’
But then she saw that he was grinning and realised he had been teasing her. She smiled and put both hands to her mouth like a schoolgirl. All the same, the surge of feeling for her father had taken her by surprise.
As they were walking back, she remembered the man who’d come to the flat.
‘Give me that again!’
He’d stopped so abruptly that she had to turn to reply.
‘He was just a man. I thought you must have known him.’
‘What the hell would make you think that?’
‘He asked for you by name.’
‘What name?’
That was a stupid question, but she didn’t feel at all like smiling.
‘Wilbur – when he said Wilbur, I just stared at him, but then he said, I’m looking for Wilbur Conway.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’
‘I’m sorry. You were so upset when I told you about getting a job in the bookstore and then there was one thing after another—’ Having to go back and refuse the job; making up with Bobbie; the magic day they spent together; making love at night. She shrugged and tried to smile. ‘It went out of my head. That sounds so stupid.’
He shook his head at her and suddenly he was smiling. ‘You’re perfectly right. It doesn’t matter. Of course, it doesn’t matter.’ He took her by the arm and they began walking. ‘Truth is, I was upset at the idea of anyone interrupting our time together. If I had my way, we’d be alone on a desert island…’ He laughed. ‘Speaking of which. Tomorrow I’ll take you to a lake with yachts and swimming and people fishing for trout.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Not far at all. Tempe is just up the road. It has a man-made lake. You walk along the footpath beside it, and look out at the water until you come to the end. Like coming to the end of a bathtub – there’s a wall – one side’s blue water, the other’s dust and sand. A lake in the middle of the desert.’
‘It sounds amazing.’
‘Only in America. Almost two million gallons a day evaporate off the surface, and they replace it from the Colorado River – the one that runs through Death Valley.’
‘But that must be hundreds of miles away.’
‘They have an aqueduct. Like I say, only in America.’
It was a favourite expression of his.
She found the thought of the lake in the desert offended her. It was heroic but it was arrogant. More than anything else, it seemed so heedless. Sooner or later if you went against the grain of the world, there would be a punishment. There was no way she could say any of that. When he took her to the lake, she resolved, she would enjoy it with a simple heart. Any other response instinct told her would disappoint him. It had been like that with everything he had shown her in Arizona. Like a host, he had wanted her to appreciate the wonders of so much luxury in so unforgiving a place.
‘Why don’t we turn back?’ she asked. ‘There’s a bus stop back there. Let’s get the bus. It’s so hot.’
The air was stifling her suddenly. She was physically weary. Not like me to be so tired, she thought, perhaps there’s been too much emotion these last few days.
‘Sure,’ he said, but in the act of turning he grinned and pointed across the street.
‘The bookshop?’ she asked. Nothing in their time together had suggested he would get excited over a bookshop.
He was already crossing over. As she caught up, he said, ‘Look at the name!’
The Poison Pen, she read.
‘Guess what kind of books they sell.’
Crime books, of course, shelves of them.
‘We’re famous,’ the woman told them. ‘Look us up on the Net.’
And when she learnt they were Scots, ‘We had Ian Rankin in here one time. You enjoying your visit?’
‘We live here,’ Betty said, making and enjoying a claim to belong.
‘Seems like everyone in Arizona comes from somewhere else,’ the woman said philosophically. ‘I’m from Idaho originally.’
The shop was empty except for them. Bobbie mooched around the shelves while she and the woman talked.
‘If you’d been earlier, you’d have seen a real cop,’ the woman said. ‘Somebody stole a car from the vacant lot. He was in asking if I’d seen anything. Of course, I hadn’t. Who’d expect a crime here?’
Betty wondered about telling her that the night before as they lay in bed Bobbie and she had heard guns popping faintly in the distance. That hadn’t been in Scottsdale, of course, but Phoenix, which like any city had a downtown you wanted to avoid at night. It was even possible, it occurred to her, that Bobbie had been testing her credulity. As she glanced over at him, he was reading a book he’d taken from the shelf.
Following her glance, the woman asked him, ‘You like crime books?’
‘Ones I’ve read don’t know what they’re talking about,’ he said.
‘Not all of them! Some of the writers do a lot of research. They’ve got magazines too. With articles on ballistics and DNA, all kinds of stuff. And then there’s some writers have been policemen or lawyers. John Grisham was a lawyer. George V Higgins, I think he was a district attorney.’
‘I’ve read John Grisham,’ Betty said.
‘Seen the movies,’ Bobbie said. ‘I’m kept too busy to find time for reading.’
Betty looked at him in surprise. Each time she’d asked what he did for a living, he’d laughed and told her money wasn’t a problem. She’d left it at that, happy to live in the moment, though knowing she’d have to come back to the subject at some point. It wasn’t something you could put off for ever. Now when he looked back at her, blank eyed, she felt a stab of guilt as if he had read her thoughts and she had been disloyal.
‘You’re from Idaho?’ Bobbie asked the woman, replacing the book on the shelf. ‘My mother was from Ennui. That’s a little town in Idaho.’
‘I don’t know it,’ the woman said.
He smiled, a twitch of the lips, as he took Betty by the elbow and made to leave.
Holding the door open, he said, ‘Ennui – if you look it up on the map, it’s just south of Bored Shitless.’
Outside, she said to him, ‘Why did you do that?’
He shrugged. Going back the way they’d come, he moved in long strides so that she had to catch up.
‘Is something wrong?’ The words came in a little gasp as if she was more out of breath than she should have been. She glanced sideways at him, remembering the previous night when his lovemaking had included persuading her for the first time to ‘suck his dick’. He’d actually used the charmless American locution. ‘Suck my dick,’ he’d whispered. She was a grown woman, but that had been a new experience. Sandy hadn’t been into fellatio; and as for the only other man she’d slept with, it hadn’t come up on their one night stand. She had been excited by the response she’d got from bobbing her head between his legs, but now she wondered if it had made him despise her. She knew it was a stupid thought, an old-fashioned thought, but bewildered by what he had done she couldn’t help the idea occurring to her.
They turned left and at the end of the street she could see where the bus would stop. Abruptly, he swung across to where tables were set out in the shade. By the time she took a seat opposite him, he had ordered drinks.
They sat in silence.
When the drinks came, she said, ‘She seemed a nice woman.’ She knew she should keep quiet, but she couldn’t leave it alone. She wanted everything to be all right again. ‘What you said upset her.’
‘You think so?’
She nodded.
He pushed away his drink and stood up.
‘She seemed like a nice woman?’ he said seriously, as if seeking her opinion. ‘You think I was cruel?’
‘Not cruel,’ she protested. She hadn’t said ‘cruel’. ‘Where are you going?’
He’d taken a few steps from the table. ‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry. You wait here. Finish your drink.’ Her impulse was to stand and go with him, but he held her in her seat rubbing a hand along her shoulder. ‘Don’t miss me too little,’ he said.
Accompanying him was something to be done at once before second thoughts intervened. Let him go if he wanted to, she told herself. It was stupid. It was as if he was mocking her. It was cool under the awning. Let him walk back in the heat, if that’s what he wanted. Five minutes passed. When she next looked at her watch, quarter of an hour had gone. She got up and went to the corner. Cars went past. The hot street stayed empty.
In the bookshop, the woman looked up and frowned.
‘Your husband? He hasn’t been back here.’
Her smile was thin and hostile.
‘I’m sorry he was rude to you,’ Betty said.
‘Didn’t seem a funny joke was all. I don’t suppose he meant any harm.’
Betty laid her hand on the pile of books on the counter then took it away. The front cover showed a rag doll with frizzed blonde hair and its legs askew. A knife lay at an angle to the doll. Betty picked up a copy and laid it down again.
‘He was coming back here,’ she said.
‘If that’s what he told you, he didn’t make it. I wouldn’t have any reason to lie to you.’
‘I didn’t mean – I just can’t think what could have happened to him. We were having a drink in the shade – it’s so warm – and he told me he was coming back here to apologise.’
‘To apologise?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t see any need for him to do that.’
She hadn’t seen any need for it either. It was why she had sat on in the shade, out of the hot sun.
‘Why would he say that he was coming back, if he wasn’t?’
‘Maybe he was joking. Seems like he had a funny sense of humour.’ The words having been sharp enough to relieve her irritation seemed to restore her at once to a more neighbourly feeling. In a tone of some kindness, she advised, ‘It’s been some kind of mix up. Believe me, you’ll find him waiting for you back at your hotel.’
‘We’re not in a hotel. I told you we live here.’
‘So you did,’ the woman said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By the third day, though she was bewildered and frightened, it was a consolation that the police were taking her husband’s disappearance seriously. A sympathetic woman detective had gone through all the possibilities with her and though there was nothing from the hotels or the hospitals she clung to the notion of some kind of memory loss. Heat stroke maybe; he hadn’t been wearing a hat.
It was the afternoon of the third day that things changed with the appearance of two new officers, men she hadn’t seen before. She asked after the woman detective whom she had come to rely on.
‘She’s not available.’
They’d taken her up in a lift to a room she hadn’t seen before. With the thick carpet on the floor, prints of wild horses, big windows on one wall showing segments of solid blue sky, it wasn’t like an interview room but an office borrowed for the occasion. It didn’t feel as if she was in a police station any more, and if the two men were policemen, as they claimed, they were a different breed from the ones she’d been dealing with till then.
‘I’ve been through all this,’ she told them.
