Orchestrated Death (26 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. It would have been better not to have spoken, to have got up in silence and gone up to bed, leaving
the unsayable unsaid. She knew it too. She turned her head away from him, a gesture of adult hurt he had seen her make almost
all their lives together.

‘For what?’ she said.

For what indeed? For the fact that the only way he could live with his crippling sense of responsibility was to be a policeman
and do the one thing he could do well to make the world a better place. Fat comfort.

‘It isn’t nice for me either,’ he said at last. ‘Never being home. Never seeing my children. Do you know, Kate looked at me
just now like a stranger. She just stood there waiting for me to go away again.’

There were many things Irene might have said or done in response to that appeal, but instead, after a short silence, she said
in a neutral voice, ‘Marilyn Cripps rang earlier on.’

The Cripps were a couple they had met some time ago at a garden party: he was a magistrate, and she was on the PC of Dorney
Church and was a voluntary steward for the National Trust at Cliveden. They had a large detached house and a son at Eton,
and Irene had been almost humble when after the first meeting Mrs Cripps had proved willing to continue the acquaintance.
That was the kind of society she had always longed for; the sort she would have had as of right if Slider had only been promoted
as he ought to have been. The wife of a police commissioner might mix on equal terms with the highest in the land.

‘She asked us to a dinner party,’ she went on unemphatically, ‘but I couldn’t accept without consulting you. With most husbands,
of course, that would be just a formality, but with you I suppose it’s hardly even worth asking.’

‘Well, when is it, exactly,’ Slider began dishonestly, for he knew her indifferent tone of voice was assumed.

‘What’s the point? Even if you say yes, when the time comes you’ll call it off at the last minute, which is so
rude
to the hostess. Or you’ll turn up late, which is worse. And even if you do go, you’ll complain about having to wear a dinner
jacket, and sulk, and sit there staring at the wall and saying nothing, and start like an imbecile if anyone talks to you.’

‘Why don’t you go without me?’ Slider said cautiously.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ She showed a flash of anger. ‘We were invited as a couple. You don’t go to dinner parties like that on
your own. I wouldn’t be so inconsiderate as to suggest it.’

There was nothing he could say to that, so he kept silent. After a moment she went on, in a low, grumbling tone, like a volcano
building up to its eruption.

‘I hate going out without you. Everyone looks at me so pityingly, as if I were a leper. How can I have any kind of decent
social life with you? How am I ever going to meet anyone. It’s bad enough living on this estate –’

‘I thought you liked this estate.’

‘You know nothing about what I like!’ she flared. ‘I liked it all right as a start, but I never thought we’d be staying here
permanently. I thought you’d get on, and then we’d move to somewhere better; somewhere like Datchet or Chalfont, where nice
people live. Somewhere the children can make the right sort of friends. Somewhere where they give dinner parties!’

Slider managed not to smile at that, for she was deadly serious. ‘Well if you’re not happy here, we’ll move,’ he said. ‘Why
don’t you start looking round –’

‘How can we move?’ she cried, goaded. ‘We can’t afford anywhere decent on what you earn! God knows you’re never here, you
work long enough hours – or so you tell me – but where does it get you? Other people are always being promoted ahead of you.
And you know why – because they
know
you’ve got no ambition. You don’t care. You won’t speak up for yourself. You won’t make the effort to be nice to the right
people …’

‘There’s such a thing as pride –’

‘Oh! Pride! Are you proud of being everyone’s dogsbody? Are you proud of being left all the rotten jobs? Being left behind
by men half your age? They don’t respect you for it,
you know. I’ve seen you at those department parties, standing on your own, refusing to talk to anyone in case they think you’re
sucking up to them. And I’ve seen the way they look at you. You embarrass them. You’re a white elephant.’

She stopped abruptly, hearing the echo of her own words, unforgivable, on the air. He was silent. Policemen should never marry,
he thought dully, because they couldn’t honour all their obligations and still do their job properly. And yet if they didn’t
marry, like priests they wouldn’t be whole people; and how could they do their job properly if they were in ignorance of the
way ninety per cent of people lived?

For a fleeting, guilty moment he thought of Joanna, and how if he were married to someone like her it would be all right.
No, not someone like her, but
her.
With her he could be a good policeman, and happy. Happy and good, and understood. His tired mind reeled. He mustn’t think
about Joanna in the middle of a row with Irene. That was bad.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this is a very bad case I’m in the middle of, and –’

She didn’t wait for him to finish. ‘You can’t even pay me the compliment of being angry, can you. Oh God!’ She stared at him,
furious and helpless, frozen like an illustration in the
Strand Magazine.
‘Baffled’, was the word they would have used.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he began again, ‘but this is a particularly horrible case. An old woman and a young man have been killed
since the original murder, and I feel partly to blame for that. It’s going to take up all my time and energy until I can get
further forward, and that simply can’t be helped. But I promise you, when it’s over, we’ll really get down to it and have
a long talk, and try to sort things out. Will you try and be patient, please?’

She shrugged.

‘And now I think I will go up to bed. I haven’t had any sleep for ages, and I’m dead beat.’

Typically, once he had gone upstairs and undressed and cleaned his teeth and got into bed, he found himself wide awake, his
mind ready and eager to tramp endlessly over the beaten ground of the case. In self-defence he took up his bedside book, a
long-neglected and suitably soporific Jeffrey
Archer, and thus was still sitting up reading when Irene came in.

‘I thought you were dead beat,’ she said neutrally. The heaviness of her tread spoke of her unhappiness: she had always been
a brisk, light mover.

‘Getting ready for bed woke me up, so I thought I’d read for a bit,’ he said. She turned away to make her own preparations,
and he watched her covertly while pretending to be engrossed in the book. In complete contrast to Joanna, she was a woman
who looked better dressed than undressed: she had the kind of figure that clothes were designed to look good on, but which
was of little interest viewed solely as a body. She was slender without being either rounded or supple; she had straight arms
and legs, flat hips, and small, dim breasts which, he thought now, had only ever made him feel sad.

Once, in the few weeks at the very beginning of their marriage, they had both slept naked, but the idea was now so remote
that it surprised him to remember it. After those first weeks, Irene had begun to wear her trousseau nightdresses because
‘it was a shame to waste them’, and he had begun to wear pyjamas because to continue naked while she slept clothed seemed
too pointed, like a criticism.

She came back from the bathroom bringing the smell of toothpaste and Imperial Leather with her, neat and almost pretty in
her flowered cotton nightgown and with her dark hair composed and shiningly brushed. She was so complete, he thought, but
it was not a completeness which satisfied. It was a completeness which suggested that the last word had been said about her,
and that nothing about her could be any different: this was Irene, and that was that.

Again, he thought, that was in complete contrast to Joanna, who in his thoughts of her seemed always to be flowing about like
an amoeba, constantly in a state of change. Away from her he found it hard accurately to remember her face. Thinking about
her at all had to be done cautiously, as if it might push the malleable material of her out of shape.

Irene stopped at the foot of the bed, and was looking at him, her head a little lowered, chewing her bottom lip in a
way that made her appear uncharacteristically vulnerable. She had a barrel-at-the-edge-of-Niagara look about her which warned
him that she was about to broach a dangerous subject, and he wished he could forestall her; but to do so was to admit that
there was no longer any point in caring enough to quarrel, and he couldn’t quite do that to her.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked when it was plain she needed a shove.

For another long moment she hesitated, teetering, and then, all in a rush, she said, ‘I know all about her – your girlfriend.’

Strange how the body acknowledged guilt even when the mind felt none. For a moment the hot, peppery fluid of it completely
replaced his blood and rushed around his body, making his heart thump unexpectedly in his stomach; yet even while that was
happening he had replied calmly and without measurable hesitation, ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend.’

Irene made a restless, negating movement and went on as if he hadn’t spoken. Of course, I’ve known for some time that something
was going on, but I didn’t know what. I mean, the fact that we haven’t made love for fifteen months –’

He was stricken that she knew exactly how long it was. He could only have guessed. But female lives were marked out in periods
and pills, and sex for them, he supposed, would always be tied to dates.

‘And then, all those times that you’re not here – well, some of them are work, I suppose, but not all of them. But I wasn’t
sure until quite recently what it was.’

‘There’s nothing going on. You’re just imagining things,’ he said, but she looked at him, and he saw in the depths of her
expression not anger but a terrible hurt; and he saw in one unwelcome moment of insight how for a woman this was a wound which
would not heal. A man whose wife was unfaithful would be consumed with anger, outrage, jealousy perhaps; but to a wife, unfaithfulness
was a deep sickness that ate away at the bones of self.

‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ she said. ‘I could tell from their voices that they knew all about it, Nicholls and O’Flaherty,
when they phoned me up with your excuses. And Atherton – I’ve seen the way he looks at me, pityingly. I
suppose they all know – everyone except me. And laugh about it. What a gay dog you are! I bet they slap your back and congratulate
you, don’t they?’

‘You’re wrong, completely wrong –’

‘I’ve put up with it so far. But now you’ve started sleeping the night with her, and using this case as your excuse, and I’m
damned if I’ll put up with that! It’s disgusting! And with a girl young enough to be your daughter! How could you do a thing
like that?’

So many things ran through Slider’s mind at that moment that he was, mercifully, prevented from speaking. For one thing he
was surprised that Irene, even in the grip of oratory, should describe Joanna as being young enough to be his daughter; and
another considerable number of brain cells was preoccupied with the problem of how she could possibly have found out. No-one
at ‘F’ District would give him away, he would have staked his life on that, and the notion that she had put a private detective
onto him was ludicrous. And underneath these preoccupations was the thought that these were shameful things to be thinking
at such a moment, and that he should be feeling bad and guilty and remorseful at having hurt Irene.

And what he did say in the end came out sounding quite calm and natural. ‘You’re completely mistaken. I haven’t got a girlfriend,
and I certainly wouldn’t be interested in anyone young enough to be my daughter.’

‘Oh, you liar!’ she cried softly, and with a superbly unstudied movement flung a photograph down on the bed beside him. ‘Who’s
this, then? A perfect stranger? Don’t tell me you carry a perfect stranger’s picture around in your wallet. You
bastard!
You’ve never carried a picture of me around with you, never, not even –’

She stopped and turned away abruptly, so that he shouldn’t see her crying. Slider picked up the photograph, bemused and amused
and relieved and sorry, and most of all just terribly, horribly sad. From the palm of his hand Anne-Marie looked up at him,
all sun-dazzle and whipped hair and eternal, unshakeable youth, the little white starfish hand against the dark blue sea frozen
for ever in that moment of joyful exuberance.

Loving Joanna had stopped him being haunted by her, but now it all came back to him in a rush; the pointless, pitiful waste
of her sordid little death. They had put her down like an old dog, stripped her with the callousness of abattoir workers,
and dumped her on the grimy floor of that grim and empty flat. He remembered the childlike tumble of her hair and the pathos
of her small, unripe breasts, and a pang of nameless grief settled in his stomach. It was his old grief for a world in which
people did such pointlessly horrible things to each other; sorrow for the loss of the world in which he had grown up, where
the good people outnumbered the bad, and there was always something to look forward to. It was the reason he had taken this
job in the first place, and the thing he had to fight against, because it unmanned him and made him useless to perform it.
Oh, but he and his colleagues struggled day after day and could make no jot of difference to the way things were, or the way
things would be, and the urge to stop struggling was so strong, so strong, because it was hopeless, wasn’t it?

Irene had turned again, and now flinched from the despair in his face. She had always known there was a streak of melancholy
in him, which he had tried to hide from her as from himself; but until this moment she had not known how strong it was, or
how deep it went. She remembered all at once those stories of policemen who drank themselves insensible the moment they came
off duty, who took drugs, or rutted their way to oblivion through countless women’s bodies; and of the policemen who committed
suicide, unem-phatically, like tired children lying down just anywhere to sleep. She wondered what it was that had held Slider
together in the face of his own despair, and had little hope that it was her, except in so far as she and the children provided
a kind of counter-irritant. She wondered how much longer it would work, and what would happen then; and whether, when the
end came, she would have any right to resent her fate as victim of it.