Aftermath (29 page)

Julia smiled back, then looked at Banks. ‘I’m afraid they don’t make doubles, Lucy.’

‘That’s right,’ said Banks. ‘Like girls, do you, Lucy?’

‘There was no need for that, Superintendent,’ Julia Ford said. ‘And I’ll thank you to keep any more questions you might have until we’re in the interview room.’

Lucy just glared at Banks.

‘Anyway,’ Julia Ford went on, turning back to Lucy. ‘Let’s not be pessimistic. It might not come to that.’ She turned to Banks. ‘Might I suggest, Superintendent, that we leave by a discreet exit? You can’t have failed to notice the media presence.’

‘It’s a big story for them,’ Banks said. ‘But yes, that’s a good idea. I’ve got another one, too.’

‘Oh?’

‘That we take Lucy to Eastvale for questioning. You and I know damn well that Millgarth will be a zoo once the press find out she’s there. This way we’ve got a chance of avoiding all that chaos, at least for a while.’

Julia Ford thought for moment, then looked at Lucy. ‘It’s a good idea,’ she said.

‘Will you come to Eastvale with me? I’m scared.’

‘Of course.’ Julia looked at Banks. ‘I’m sure the Superintendent here can recommend a decent hotel?’

•

‘But how could she possibly know I’m seeing you?’ Maggie asked Dr Susan Simms at the start of her session that afternoon.

‘I’ve no idea, but you can be certain I didn’t tell anyone. And I told her nothing.’

‘I know,’ said Maggie. ‘Thank you.’

‘Think nothing of it, dear. It’s a matter of professional ethics. This implied support of yours for Lucy Payne, is it true?’

Maggie felt her anger bristle again as she remembered her argument with Banks that morning. She still felt upset by it. ‘I think Lucy’s been a victim of abuse, yes.’

Dr Simms remained silent for a while, gazing out of the window, then she shifted in her chair and said, ‘Just be careful, Margaret. Just be careful. You seem to be under a lot of stress. Now, shall we begin? I believe last time we were talking about your family.’

Maggie remembered. It was their fourth session, and the first time they’d touched on Maggie’s own family background. Which surprised her. She’d been expecting Freudian questions about her relationship with her father right from the start, even though Dr Simms had insisted she wasn’t a Freudian analyst.

They were sitting in a small office overlooking Park Square, a peaceful, elegant bit of eighteenth-century Leeds. Birds sang in the trees amid the pink and white blossoms, and students sat on the grass reading or simply enjoying the sun again after yesterday’s rain. Most of the humidity seemed to have cleared away and the air was crisp and warm. Dr Simms had her window open, and Maggie could smell flowers from the window-box; she didn’t know what kind, but they were flowers all right, red and white and purple. She could just see the top of the town hall dome over the trees and elegant façades of the houses on the opposite side of the square.

The place was just like a doctor’s office, Maggie thought, or at least an old-style doctor’s office, with solid desk, diplomas on the wall, fluorescent lights, filing cabinets and bookcases full of psychological journals and textbooks. There was no couch; Maggie and Dr Simms sat in armchairs, not facing each other, but at a slight angle so that eye contact was easy but not mandatory, co-operative rather than confrontational. Dr Simms had been recommended by Ruth, and so far she was turning out to be a real find. In her mid-fifties, solidly built, matronly even, and with a severe look about her, she always wore old-fashioned Laura Ashley-style clothes, and her blue-grey hair was lacquered into whorls and waves that looked razor-sharp. Appearances to the contrary, Dr Simms had the kindest, most compassionate manner Maggie could wish for, without being soft. For she certainly wasn’t soft; sometimes she was downright prickly, especially if Maggie – whom she always called Margaret for some reason – got her defences up or started whimpering.

‘There was never any violence in the home when we were growing up. My father was strict, but he never used his fists or his belt to discipline us. Neither my sister Fiona nor me.’

‘So what
did
he do for discipline?’

‘Oh, the usual things. Grounded us, stopped our pocket money, lectured us, that sort of thing.’

‘Did he raise his voice?’

‘No. I never heard him yell at anyone.’

‘Did your mother have a violent temper?’

‘Good Lord, no. I mean she might get mad and shout if Fiona or I did something annoying, like not tidying up our rooms, but it’d be all over and forgotten in no time.’

Dr Simms put her fist under her chin and rested on it. ‘I see. Let’s get back to Bill, shall we?’

‘If you like.’

‘No, Margaret, it’s not for me to like. It’s for you to want.’

Maggie shifted in her chair. ‘Yes, all right.’

‘You told me in our previous session that you’d seen signs of his aggressiveness before you were married. Can you tell me more about that?’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t directed towards me.’

‘Towards whom was it directed? The world in general, perhaps?’

‘No. Just some people. People who screwed up. Like waiters or delivery men.’

‘Did he beat them up?’

‘He got mad, lost his temper, yelled at them. Called them idiots, morons. What I meant was that he channelled a lot of aggression into his work.’

‘Ah, yes. He’s a lawyer, right?’

‘Yes. For a big firm. And he wanted to make partner very badly.’

‘He’s competitive by nature?’

‘Very. He was a high-school sports star, and he might have ended up playing professional football if he hadn’t ripped his knee apart in a championship game. He still walks with a slight limp, but he hates it if anyone notices it and mentions it. It doesn’t stop him playing with the firm’s softball team. But I don’t see what this has to do with anything.’

Dr Simms leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Margaret, I want you to see, to understand, where your husband’s anger and violence come from. They didn’t come from you; they came from him. They didn’t come out of your family background in any way, either. They came from his. Only when you see that, when you see that it was
his
problem and not yours, will you start to believe that it wasn’t your fault, and will you find the strength and courage to go on and live your life as fully as you can, rather than continue in this shadow-existence you have at the moment.’

‘But I already see that,’ Maggie protested. ‘I mean, I know it was
his
aggression, not mine.’

‘But you don’t
feel
it.’

Maggie felt disappointed; Dr Simms was right. ‘Don’t I?’ she said. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Do you know anything about poetry, Margaret?’

‘Not much, no. Only what we did at school, and one of my boyfriends at art college used to write me stuff. Terrible drivel, really. He just wanted to get in my pants.’

Dr Simms laughed. Another surprise, for it came out as a loud, horsy guffaw. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called “Dejection: An Ode”. It was partly about his inability to
feel
anything, and one of the quotes that has always stuck in my mind was when he wrote about looking at the clouds, the moon and the stars and ended up saying, “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.” I think that applies to you, Margaret. And I think you know it. Intellectual awareness of something, through
reason
, does not guarantee emotional acceptance. And you are a very intellectual person, despite your obvious creative inclinations. If I were a Jungian, which I am not, I would probably classify you as the introverted, thinking type. Now tell me more about this courtship.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’ A door opened and closed out in the corridor. Two male voices rose and fell. Then only the birdsongs and the sounds of distant traffic on the Headrow and Park Lane remained. ‘I suppose he swept me off my feet,’ she went on. ‘It was about seven years ago, and I was just a young art school graduate without a career, still wet behind the ears, hanging out with the artsy crowd in bars and arguing philosophy in Queen Street West pubs and coffee houses, thinking one day some rich patron would appear and discover my genius. I’d had a few affairs in college, slept with a few boys, nothing satisfactory, then along came this tall, dark, intelligent, handsome man in an Armani suit who wanted to take me to concerts and expensive restaurants. It wasn’t the money. That wasn’t it at all. Not even the restaurants. I wasn’t even eating much then. It was his style, his panache, I suppose. He dazzled me.’

‘And did he prove to be the patron of the arts you’d been dreaming of?’

Maggie looked down at the scuffed knees of her jeans. ‘Not really. Bill was never very much interested in the arts. Oh, we had all the requisite subscriptions: symphony, ballet, opera. But somehow I . . .’

‘Somehow you what?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being unfair. But I think maybe it was just some sort of a business thing. Being
seen
. Like going to a client’s box at the Skydome. I mean, he’d be excited about going to the opera, for example, take ages getting dressed up in his tux and fuss about what he wanted me to wear, then we’d have drinks in the members’ bar beforehand, rub shoulders with colleagues and clients, all the local bigwigs. But I just got the impression that the music itself
bored
him.’

‘Did any problems manifest themselves early on in your relationship?’

Maggie twisted her sapphire ring around her finger, the ‘freedom’ ring she had bought after she had thrown Bill’s wedding and engagement rings into Lake Ontario. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s easy to identify things as problems in retrospect, isn’t it? Claim that you saw it coming, or should have, after you’ve found out where things were leading. They might not have seemed strange at the time, might they?’

‘Try.’

Maggie continued twisting at her ring. ‘Well, I suppose the main problem was Bill’s jealousy.’

‘About what?’

‘Most things, really. He was very possessive, he didn’t like me talking to other men for too long at parties, that sort of thing. But mostly he was jealous of my friends.’

‘The artists?’

‘Yes. You see, he never had much time for them, he thought them all a bunch of deadbeats, losers, and he felt he’d somehow
rescued
me from them.’ She laughed. ‘And they, on their part, didn’t want to mix with corporate lawyers in Armani suits.’

‘But you continued to see your friends?’

‘Oh, yes. Sort of.’

‘And how did Bill react to this?’

‘He used to make fun of them to me, put them down, criticize them. He called them pseudo-intellectuals, no-brainers and layabouts. If we ever met any of them when we were together, he’d just stand there, looking up at the sky, shifting from foot to foot, glancing at his Rolex, whistling. I can see him now.’

‘Did you defend them?’

‘Yes. For a while. Then there seemed no point.’ Maggie remained silent for a moment, then she went on. ‘You have to remember that I was head-over-heels in love with Bill. He took me to movie premieres. We’d go for weekends in New York, stay at the Plaza, take horse and buggy rides in Central Park, go to cocktail parties full of stockbrokers and CEOs, you name it. There was a romantic side to it all. Once we even flew down to LA for a movie premiere the firm’s entertainment lawyers had been involved with. We went to the party, too, and Sean Connery was there. Can you believe it? I actually met
Sean Connery
!’

‘How did
you
handle all this high living?’

‘I fitted in well enough. I was good at mixing with them – businessmen, lawyers, entrepreneurs, the movers and shakers. Believe it or not, many of them are far more cultured than the artsy crowd thinks. A lot of them sponsored corporate art collections. My friends believed that everyone in a suit was dull and conservative, and a philistine to boot. But you can’t always go by appearances. I knew that. I think they were being very immature about it all. I think Bill saw me as a positive enhancement to his career, but he saw my friends as dead weights that would drag me down with them if they could. Maybe him, too, if we weren’t careful. And I didn’t feel anywhere near as uncomfortable in his world as he did in mine. I began to feel I’d only been playing the
starving
artist role, anyway.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, my dad’s a pretty important architect, and we always moved in elevated circles. Travelled around the continent a fair bit on commissions, too, when I was younger, just after we emigrated from England. Sometimes, if it was school holidays, he’d take me with him. So I didn’t come from a blue collar background or a bohemian one. Dad appreciates the arts, but he’s very conservative. And we weren’t poor. Anyway, as time went on, I suppose I began to agree with Bill. He wore down my defences, like he did in a lot of other ways. I mean, all my friends seemed to do was drift from one social security cheque to the next without making any attempt to
do
anything because it would compromise their precious art. The greatest sin in our crowd was to sell out.’

‘Which you did?’

Maggie stared out of the window for a moment. The blossoms were falling from the trees in slow motion. She suddenly felt cold and hugged herself. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I did. As far as my friends were concerned I was lost to them. I’d been seduced by the almighty dollar. And all because of Bill. At one of his firm’s parties I met a small publisher who was looking for an illustrator for a children’s book. I showed him my work and he loved it. I got the job, then that led to another, and so on.’

‘How did Bill react to your success?’

‘He was pleased at first. Thrilled. Proud that the publisher liked my work, proud when the book was published. He bought copies for all his nephews and nieces, his clients’ kids. His boss. Dozens of copies. And he was pleased that it was because of him all this had happened. As he never ceased to tell me, it would never have happened if I’d chosen to stay with my deadbeat friends.’

‘This was at first. What about later?’

Maggie felt herself shrinking in the chair, her voice becoming smaller. ‘That was different. Later, after we were married and Bill still hadn’t made partner, I think he started to resent my success. He started referring to art as my “little hobby” and suggested I might have to give it up at any time and start having babies.’