A Love Like Blood (20 page)

She opened my trousers and turned around, dropping her shorts to her ankles, and as she did so, I saw that my fingers had blood on them, from her.

I said something, nothing really, I can’t remember. Maybe I just said ‘Oh’, but she looked at the blood as I showed her my fingers, and she gave me a look that was neither a smile nor a sneer.

‘So?’ she said. ‘You can’t have sex without a little blood, can you? We wouldn’t have this, for a start.’

She took my erection in her hand and tugged it.

‘No blood,’ she said, ‘no sex,’ and putting me inside her, turned her face to the wall and the rest . . . well, the rest is obvious enough.

I went back to my hotel where I lay on the bed while the shower ran.

I washed myself, washing the dark, red-brown blood from me, and thought about nothing but Arianna.

No blood, no sex.

I didn’t know if I was disgusted or aroused by what she’d done. What I’d done. Disgusted or aroused, or maybe both.

She’d told me to meet her later, as we’d arranged before the two minutes in the alleyway.

At seven thirty I ate in the restaurant for speed, after which I felt sweaty and went upstairs to shower again and change.

My head was full of her. Of her long brown hair, her legs. The sight of her breasts, the intensity of the way in which she’d set out to catch me, and had. That was what excited me the most. Maybe she had a thing for older men. I really didn’t care, I’m not sure I even thought about it. I just wanted her again.

At half-past eight, I left my room, dropped my key in at reception, and as I was walking away, the receptionist called me back.

‘Signor Jackson?’

I turned. ‘Yes?’

The receptionist, an older woman, was holding out something towards me. ‘You have a telegram. And a message.’

‘Yes?’

‘A lady calls from the university.’

She was reading carefully from a note.

‘She says that the professor phoned this afternoon. She says to say he does not know of your visit and cannot help you. She is sorry for your trouble.’

I stared at the woman for a long time, but there was nothing to say. She had no idea why I was so confused, what the mystery was.

‘And the telegram?’

She handed it to me, and even before I read it, I knew it was something serious. No one would send me a telegram otherwise, but I knew more than that. I knew immediately what it was.

It was from my sister, and that was how I learned that my father was dying.

All thoughts of the Roman girl vanished, and within two hours I was catching the last flight home to London, to wait with my father while he died.

Chapter 5

I didn’t go home.

I went straight from the airport to Richmond and met my sister at the hospital.

‘You look bloody awful,’ she said.

‘Hello, Susan,’ I said. ‘How is he?’

‘He’s dying, you idiot. How do you think he is?’

I kissed her cheek and she filled me in on our father’s approaching end.

It’s fair to say that we were not a close family. Mother was the one who held the rest of us together, and when she died, Father became a recluse, and he and Susan and I all saw very little of each other.

We could have tried to treat Father’s leukaemia. If we’d known about it. But he kept it to himself until it was well beyond that time.

Leukaemia. The irony was not lost on me, nor on Susan.

‘Can’t you lot fix this stuff by now?’ she said, as we walked away from my first visit to see him.

Father looked worse than I’d guessed he might. But then, as Susan said, he was dying.

Already he didn’t know who I was, what time of day it was, or even what was happening to him. He was no longer there, because of the morphine they were giving him. Pain control was all there was to do. That and wait, and it turned out there was a lot of waiting to be done.

I waited for another day or two, finding a cheap guesthouse in the same road as the hospital. Susan lived a half-hour drive away. There was no suggestion I stay with her and Roger. That was fine by me.

After another day had passed, however, Susan put her foot down.

‘Charles, go home and wash, will you? Get some clean clothes, for God’s sake.’

I wrinkled my nose.

‘Right.’

So I headed for Cambridge, making sure not to sit next to anyone on the trains and walking from the station to Hills Road.

The last thing I was expecting to see when I got back was a police car in my drive.

Chapter 6

I knew things were serious when I saw a detective in plain clothes standing by my front door. A cop in uniform hung at his shoulder with an unpleasant look on his face.

They were talking to Mrs Sully, my cleaner. She hadn’t let them in, but maybe they’d only just arrived.

The detective turned as Mrs Sully saw me coming, and I saw from the look on her face that I was in trouble. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘These gentlemen—’ she began, but the plain-clothes man cut her off.

‘That’s fine, ma’am, we’ll handle it from here. Mr Jackson? Mr Charles Jackson?’

I nodded.

‘May we come in?’

‘Look, this isn’t the best . . .’

I saw there was little point in protesting.

‘Be my guest,’ I said, and followed them in, shutting the door behind me.

I waved them into my study, Mrs Sully hovering in the doorway still with a duster in her hand, probably wondering if she should offer us tea.

A sick feeling had started to crawl up from inside me, and as I listened to the detective it did nothing but get worse.

‘Detective Lovering,’ he said, then nodded at the cop. ‘Sergeant Francis.’

He stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘We have received certain information that we are sufficiently concerned about that, well . . .’

He hesitated and pulled out an official-looking sheet of paper. He handed it to me and though I looked at it, I didn’t notice a single word.

‘This is a warrant we have obtained in order that we might search your house. I trust you have no objection to that.’

I had all sorts of objections to that, but we both knew that didn’t really matter.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What am I supposed to have here? Who gave you . . . Look, you can’t just go looking in—’

‘Yes, we can,’ said the sergeant, who had already begun to pull drawers open in my desk. He rifled through a few things and then seemed to freeze.

‘Sir?’ he said, looking up, and handed a plain Manila envelope to the detective.

I had no memory of having such an envelope in that drawer, though I might have been mistaken.

‘I see,’ said the detective, and then he read me my rights.

An hour later, I sat in an interview room in the station in St Andrew’s Street.

Detective Lovering sat across from me at a table on which were spread a sordid little array of photographs of naked girls. Young girls. The sergeant, and another come to gawp, stood behind him.

I repeated again, and again, that I had no knowledge of the photos, of how they came to be in my possession, in my drawer, in my desk, in my study, and while I spoke, and while I felt sick, and while I was fully aware of everything going on, another terrible idea was screaming at me in my head.

They have been in my house. They know where I live.

Why? I thought. They came for me, but why? I felt cold; I almost wanted to appeal to these mindless policemen for help, have them protect me. Get them to help me understand what he wanted with me. It was a stupid desire, and I repressed it; these men wanted to do nothing but humiliate me.

‘So you deny these photos belong to you?’

‘I told you that.’

‘And you claim someone broke into your house while you were abroad and put them there?’

‘I don’t claim that,’ I said, ‘I
deduce
that, because there is no other explanation.’

‘Unless Mrs Sully, your cleaner, put them there?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

That wasn’t a smart thing to say.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m not saying anything else till my solicitor arrives.’

‘What gets me about guys like you is how arrogant you are.’

I knew he was trying to wind me up, and it was working. Despite my firm intention to shut up till I had representation, I couldn’t help myself.

‘You have absolutely no proof whatsoever that these photos are anything to do with me,’ I said.

‘Apart from the fact that they were in your house.’

‘Someone broke in!’

‘A proposition that we are looking into at this very moment,’ Detective Lovering said, unsmiling. ‘And in the meantime, you say you have never bought or otherwise obtained photographs of this nature.’

‘I have not.’

He shoved the photos towards me again.

‘Nothing to do with you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, and I knew they were struggling then, because, to be honest, even if they could prove the photos were mine, it was far from clear how old the girls in the photos were. There were three of them in all, in about ten pictures, and they might have been fifteen, or they might have been eighteen.

‘Nothing to do with you?’ he repeated.

‘I just said that, I—’

‘And this one is nothing to do with you either?’

The bastard. Holding his trump card till the nicest time to play it. He pulled a new photograph out from inside his jacket pocket, and flicked it over to me.

It was me, and the girl. In the alleyway, in Rome.

Chapter 7

It was many hours later that I staggered home again.

I replayed the moment when I saw the photo of me and the Italian girl, again and again, and each time I felt more and more sick.

There was no point in denying it. It was clearly me behind her. The photo was taken from somewhere slightly above us, to one side. From a window of that restaurant, the kitchens, maybe.

She had her face up to the camera, mine was just behind, less distinct, but it was me, holding a bunch of her hair in my clutching fingers.

Am I so stupid, I thought, as to have actually believed that girl really wanted me?

Am I so stupid, I thought, that only then did I wonder how old she was? Twenty, is what I would have said if I’d been thinking, but I wasn’t thinking. But maybe she was younger than that.

But not illegal. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t know the age of consent in Italy, and it further occurred to me to shut my mouth until my solicitor arrived, which I did.

John Hulme had sorted a few things for me in the past. Things like buying houses and arranging a will. Not things like defending a client from accusations of paedophilia. But he did a good job, and gave as good as we got.

We debated all afternoon, and I must have looked pretty guilty, but what I was wondering was this. How much do I tell them? Do I tell them about Verovkin? Or Lippe, should I say? Should I tell them about Marian? Hunter could vouch for me that I had been attacked in Avignon. Couldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

John kept a straight bat. That’s how my father would have described it, before he was senseless with morphine.

The sum of it was this:

They had been sent a photo, anonymously, of me having sex with a young woman. I had photos of naked girls in my house. They may or may not have been teenaged. I claimed the house must have been broken into, and the photos left there, as an attempt to incriminate me, and my God, how I breathed a sigh of relief when they admitted, much later that day, that there were signs of a forced entry to the kitchen window.

I was let out of the station, eventually. They charged me with nothing, but said they would be making further investigations. Whether they meant into me, or into the break-in at my house, I didn’t ask, and they didn’t say.

The police kept the photos. Even the one of me. Perverts.

And they also kept something else: my passport.

‘You won’t need to be travelling anywhere for a while, will you?’ the detective said, with a leering smile that made me want to punch him. I fought that desire and instead hurried out of the station house before they changed they minds.

But my anger subsided into fear as I walked home. And as I reached the doorstep, and read the note that Mrs Sully had left, saying she was a bit too busy to be my cleaner any more, and as I slumped into an armchair with a very stiff drink in one hand, the one thought I had was one of terror.

They had been in my house. Someone, one of them, I didn’t know who. Now I knew why a very attractive girl maybe twenty years younger than me had had sex with me in an alleyway. Because she’d been paid to. To have my photo taken.