Freya (66 page)

It transpired that Haddon would sometimes hire her for nights when he was entertaining clients at the Corsair. She didn't ask who they were, and she wasn't interested in any case: they were punters, and she got paid by the hour. By degrees Freya shifted the conversation around to that night. She knew Chrissie only slightly, she said, and hadn't been to her flat before.

‘Everything had been fine till Bruce told me to join them in her bedroom. Chrissie got in a right fit – she liked things as it was, just her and her feller –'

‘Sorry – her feller?'

‘Friend of Bruce's. He called him “Mr Hooper”, that's all I knew about him.'

‘Why did you answer the phone that night, when Ava rang?'

‘Cos no one else would! Chrissie had told us to get out, she was crying and shouting at Bruce,
you bloody pimp
. Ava wanted to know if she should come over – I said, well, she could, but the way things were goin' …'

‘Ava did go over, but by that time the flat was empty. Except for Chrissie, and she was dead.'

Bridget shook her head: as she recalled, the party was going strong when all of a sudden Bruce was tearing through the flat, telling everyone to get out. ‘I had
no idea
what was up. I seen Chrissie's feller come out of her bedroom –'

‘On his own?'

She nodded. ‘Oh, he looked white as a sheet! I don't know why he come over to me. Maybe he was grateful I didn't make a fuss or nothin' – Chrissie had said
Whatja need this tart for when you've got me
. I could understand it, really. Two's company an' that …'

‘So you all got out?'

‘Yeah, like there'd been a fire alarm. It was only later I wondered what had 'appened.'

‘And this man – Mr Hooper – can you describe him?'

‘Oh … early thirties, dark hair. Handsome. He was one of Bruce's clients.' She stared into the distance for a moment, frowning. ‘One thing he said stuck with me, though, when we was getting taxis outside the flat. That scene with Chrissie must have been on his mind, cos he gives me a fiver and says, “Sorry about that back there –
you behaved like a right good chap
.”'

Freya realised she must have shivered, because Bridget looked at her curiously then. She felt herself speaking quite mechanically. ‘They were his actual words?'

‘Yeah – a right good chap! Funny thing to say. Here,' she said, squinting, ‘are you all right?'

She got back to Canonbury Square just before two in the morning. After leaving Bridget she had driven around the darkened streets for a while, trying to fit the pieces together in her head. Truth wasn't stranger than fiction; it was just more grotesque, and upsetting. She could have guessed that Bruce Haddon had put his squalid touch on the events of that night. Chrissie had guessed it, too.
You bloody pimp
. If she hadn't known before, she rumbled him that night. And yet neither was Chrissie the innocent Freya had thought her. The girl from Bromley whose wide doe eyes seemed to glisten with incorruptible purity and youthful cheer … Of all the men – of all the married men – she could have had, she had to pick
him
. It was beyond understanding, except that, in some obscure vault of her heart, Freya understood quite well. If the girl had let the secret slip, she could have set her straight, told her what manner of being he was. And maybe that wouldn't have made one bit of difference, either.

She waited until ten the next morning before she picked up the telephone. She felt in her nerve endings an impatience that was almost sensual.

A secretary had asked her to hold the line. A click, and then his voice, puzzled yet pleased. ‘Freya?'

‘Robert.'

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?'

‘I need to speak to you.'

‘OK … I'll have to consult my diary –'

‘I'm afraid this can't wait.'

She heard a choked-back laugh at his end. ‘Honestly, I've got meetings all day –'

‘Cancel them. I'm serious. I found Bridget Lockwood.'

In the silence she could almost hear him thinking. When he spoke again his tone was cool and urbane. ‘What's this about?'

‘You know what it's about.'

This time the pause was longer, and before he could reply she named a time and a place. She half expected him to object, to bluster, like a cornered politician would, but instead he came quietly. ‘All right,' he said and rang off.

He entered the square from the Carey Street side. She was sitting at the bench that had once been her favourite, in front of the wrought-iron screen facing the chapel. The morning was warm, though the sky looked sullen and dimly threatening. A crocodile of capped and blazered schoolboys were filing towards the gatehouse, and Robert checked his step to let them pass.

He twitched a greeting with his eyes as he sat down, not quite next to her. He was wearing a dark narrow-lapelled suit with a crested tie. Surveying their surroundings he said, ‘I get the irony, of course.'

She looked at him. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘Your choosing an Inn of Court for this … rendezvous. A good place to dispense justice.'

‘That's not why I chose it,' she replied. ‘It was somewhere I used to come when I was at the
Envoy
. I once ran into Alex McAndrew here.'

Robert gave a mirthless little laugh and looked away. ‘Well, I thought there'd be an irony
some
where. By the way, I'm sorry about your – Nancy told me. I gather it was –'

‘Pretty grim,' she said crisply. ‘But I was lucky. If Nancy hadn't been there I might have just bled out, alone, in a stranger's bathroom.'

There was a pause between them, like gunfighters poised to draw. When a little dust had settled on her last remark she began: ‘A lonely death … When I was in hospital I wondered what it had been like for Chrissie. I still can't believe she meant to do it. I suspect she was so depressed, and drunk, that she forgot how many Tuinal she'd taken. And she drank because, well – the man she loved, or thought she loved, had just invited a prostitute into her bedroom.'

‘Wasn't my idea. Bruce organised the whole thing. I don't know why. I think he was annoyed with Chrissie for some reason, wanted to punish her. So he told the girl, Frances – Bridget, whatever her name was – to join us in bed.'

‘Why didn't you just tell her to piss off?'

Robert slowly rubbed his face in his palms. ‘I couldn't see the harm in it. She was an attractive girl …'

‘But you could see that Chrissie was upset, surely?'

‘Not until later. She took off out of the room, Frances and I were left there –' He laughed miserably, recalling. ‘Next thing I know, Bruce stalks in, tells me Chrissie's in the other bedroom – in a fucking coma.'

‘Why didn't you call an ambulance?'

‘I thought Bruce had. When I saw her lying there I tried to … revive her. She was limp, a rag doll. I thought there was still a chance –'

‘The ambulance didn't come because Haddon didn't call one. But I'll never be able to prove it. Ava Dunning found her two hours later, dead.'

‘I didn't know. Really. I see how bad it looks now. But to be found there would have finished me – everything. Bruce was shouting in my ear,
you've got to get out of here
. So I did.'

Passive to a fault, she thought. As long as she had known him Robert could not face up to things – two-timing her at Oxford; a divorce he delayed and bodged; now girls arranged through a pimp. Strange that he could be so decisive in professional life – the campaigner, the coming man – and so cowardly in private. She sometimes felt she had spent all her life arguing with men, refusing to be bullied by them, demanding her due. It had left some bruises. But at least in an argument you could make sure you were taken seriously. Robert's disfiguring flaw was that he wriggled out of confrontation, hoping that others would sort out the mess. Not any more.

‘I don't understand you. I don't understand how you refuse to deal with people – how you can pretend they don't have feelings.'

Robert, who'd been staring dead ahead, turned to face her. ‘I'm selfish. Most people are, I find.'

‘That's not good enough,' she said, shaking her head. ‘You've had such advantages – Oxford, a successful career, marriage to a brilliant woman. You've lived among sensitive, educated people your whole life. You've read
Middlemarch
.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘I don't know. Everything. It's unfathomable to me how someone who's read
Middlemarch
could behave the way you have.'

He looked at her askance. ‘You have a very odd idea about the value of fiction. It's just storytelling, you know, not a primer in morality.'

‘Is that all you think of Nancy's books – just stories? Do they not have any more meaning than that?'

‘They earn her a living. That's enough “meaning” for me.'

He leaned forward on the bench, elbows resting on his knees. He seemed pensive, when she had expected him to dissolve in a puddle of remorse. When he spoke again his tone had become musing. ‘
Comeuppance
. Always liked that word! Slightly afraid of it, too. Like it's coming for you.'

‘Is that what you think this is?'

‘Well, it'll make a fine front page. An MP in a scandal of sex
and
death – this one'll run. It's funny, you know. Some people think I'm a hero. You ask any West Indian, who's been their main defender in Parliament, they'll say my name.'

‘And you think that should save you?'

Robert gave a shrug. ‘Immigration will be an even bigger issue in two years. It could help win us the election. I didn't mean to become a spokesman for them, but that's the way it turned out.'

It was an oblique plea for mercy, but she heard nothing of humility in it. ‘You're no hero, Robert, whatever they say. That you should try to save your hide like this only shows what kind of man you are.'

He reverted to brooding. Freya half attended to the people passing through the cobbled square: a bespectacled gent wheeled a bicycle, trouser clips throttling his ankles; two young women deep in a lunch-hour conversation; bowler-hatted City men, students, clerkish types.

After a long minute he said, ‘So there's no appeal I can make to you – to spare me?'

‘What, like you did with Alex? There's no earthly reason why I should think of sparing you.'

‘There's one,' he said quietly. ‘Your best friend.'

She stared at him. ‘You think Nancy would want me to do that – for you?'

‘As a matter of fact I do. She knows my faults, better than anyone, but she has found it in her to forgive.'

‘There's the mystery. It's nagged away at me all these years. Why has she been so loyal to you when you're so
utterly
unworthy of her?'

Robert flinched, and tried to cover it with a dismissive laugh. ‘Maybe
Middlemarch
did it. And she's always had a tender heart. She'd hate to see me dragged into the stocks and pelted, for all my sins.'

Freya shook her head, disbelieving. ‘Let me ask you something. If you had the goods on someone – someone you had cause to loathe – and the story was big enough to make headlines and your own name along with it, what would you do?'

‘I think you already know the answer to that. Fortunately, not everyone's as ruthless as I am. Some have a conscience about what they do.'

She stood up, despising the charm of his self-reproach and yet swayed by it, reluctantly. Perhaps, at bottom, he did know himself. But why should that earn him a reprieve? For some people admitting the fault was a subtle means of excusing themselves from the blame.

‘I'm going,' she said.

Robert rose from the bench, his eyes fixed on the ground. ‘Why did you ask me here? You've already got the story. I can only think it was to gloat.'

She considered a moment. ‘Maybe it was. I was interested in how you'd react. I wondered if you'd beg.'

‘I see …'

She turned to leave, and Robert took a sudden step forward.

‘Freya, wait. I'm ready to, if that's what you want. Beg, I mean.'

She stared at him. ‘Don't bother.'

‘All right. I'm begging you.' It was as if he hadn't heard her. His voice was low and urgent. ‘Please don't do this. I'd offer you money but I know you'd despise me even more.'

‘You're right.'

‘So I'm appealing to your good nature. Please. However disgusting you think me now, you did like me once, years ago. Think of that naive galumphing chap back in Oxford, the one you knew before his – before all of this. The one who read
Middlemarch
. Something of him survives, I swear it.'

‘A right good chap,' she murmured.

‘What?'

‘Nothing. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked you here. I just wanted to look you in the eye.'

‘But – why?'

She gave a little squint. ‘To convince myself I could still hate you this much.'

With a nod she turned and walked away. She didn't look back in case the sight of him standing there alone moved her, again, to pity.

She drove up Chancery Lane and into the maze of Bloomsbury. Confused by the area's remodelling, she made a couple of wrong turns and had to retrace her route. The old Georgian streets had been knocked about badly, first by the Blitz, then by the bulldozers of the university. Whole terraces had tumbled since she was last here. She made it eventually to the threshold of Euston Road and waited at the lights, indicating right, back to Islington in the east. Across the way a colossal void gaped: the vast and trunkless legs of the Euston Arch were gone, and the breakers with them.
Nothing beside remains
… Cars and buses swished past, unconcerned by the bare, boundless space. We shall obliterate all that we love, and then live on.