A Banquet of Consequences (63 page)

The sitting room’s French window had been repaired, Lynley saw, and all other evidence of Barbara Havers’ unceremonious entrance into Rory’s flat had been removed. The curtains were open to let in the sunlight, and once he was finished making certain Rory was absolutely Rory, Arlo went to the shaft of this light that lay upon the carpet. He made four circles, fluffed up the area to his satisfaction, and lowered himself to bask in the sun’s warmth, giving a gusty sigh.

Lynley set the dog’s belongings on the floor and closed the door. From among Arlo’s possessions, he removed the two of Rory’s that he’d brought from his office: her letters from Clare and the stack of photos of her final holiday with her partner Fiona. He went to Rory at her desk and handed these over. She looked down at them, then up at him.

There was a stool nearby, and he drew it closer. Heather emerged from the kitchen, asked if he wanted a cup of tea, apparently clocked
the letters and photos, and from these understood that he would have a word with her sister. She nodded, disappeared back to the kitchen, and from there called out that she would be boiling eggs for sandwiches but they needed mayo and bread—“not to mention lettuce and tomato, which would be nice as well”—so she was going to pop out to the shops for a bit if no one minded and if Lynley would remain with Rory until her return . . . ?

When her sister left, Rory looked through the pictures. Lynley had already inspected them several times so he knew what she was seeing: the photographs of her final days with Fiona. She slowly turned them one at a time facedown on her desk, and he waited. Ultimately, she set them next to the letters from Clare, and she observed both stacks as if comparing what each of them revealed about her and her relationship to both of the other women.

She looked at him frankly. “I did love Fiona, Inspector. The relationship was difficult, but I did love her.”

“I hadn’t thought otherwise,” Lynley told her. “I find that people aren’t all one thing. One rather wishes they were for simplicity’s sake, but isn’t the truth that people are good and bad, simple and complicated, happy and sad, frightened and courageous? It’s all a mix. We learn to take in everything about a person as disparate parts to the whole, and it’s the whole that we love, even at moments when the other isn’t who we wish her to be.”

She gazed at him. “You’re quite unusual for a policeman. I expect you’ve been told that before.”

“Know lots of cops, do you?” he asked with a smile.

She chuckled. “There is that.” She fingered the edges of the envelopes that held Clare’s letters, just the corner of them, and from the looks of the corners, it seemed that this action was something she’d done often, perhaps as she considered what the contents of the letters were really saying to her. She said, “We’d separated for a few months, Fiona and I. It wasn’t for the first time. We’d been off and on for a good long while. We’d gone to Spain to see if we could patch things up one more time. We were . . . In those last days we were quite happy.” Her expression was one of a woman seeing where she’d been, not where she was. She dropped her gaze to the surface of her desk.
She was silent for a moment before she said, “I saved myself instead of her. I don’t think I’ll ever get past that if I’d not jumped from the window, she’d be alive.”

Lynley thought about everything he’d read and heard about the case. What Rory was saying, he decided, was a natural reaction to the violence she’d been caught in. It was also an unreasonable judgment upon herself. He said to her, “In a moment like that, you can’t have expectations of how you’re meant to behave. It’s not as if your life experience gives you training in what’s proper when someone appears out of the night at your bedside to attack you. There
is
no proper in such a situation. There is only the instinct for survival.”

“You know that’s not true,” she said, shifting her gaze to his. “Soldiers in battle disprove that every time there’s a war.”

“Indeed,” he said. “Soldiers do just that, every day and all over the world. But those soldiers are also trained. You weren’t.”

Again, she was quiet, her face looking weighted down with profound sadness. She said, “I’ve told myself for years that I was going for help when I jumped from the window. I said that afterwards, in court as well. But, you see, there was no help because the cottage was so far removed, which was why we’d chosen it. Privacy, the view, the sun, the beach. No phone to bother us, no Internet, not even coverage for a mobile near the house. There was no one in miles to help, and I certainly knew it when I leapt from the window. I stumbled round in the dark—in that perfect away-from-humanity darkness—and there was a drop that wasn’t quite a cliff some yards from the cottage and I fell down it. So he couldn’t find me afterwards, not in the dark, and he’d lost his torch in the chaos. So that’s how it was. For want of a torch, one woman lived. Who should not have.”

Lynley leaned forward. “You’re leaving out part of the story. As I recall it, you were bleeding from multiple knife wounds. You’d been raped. You’d been beaten. You can’t leave out that part
because
it’s part. The fact that you made it to the window and leapt out saved your life, it’s true. But it also preserved you not only as a victim but also as an eyewitness so that for him there was no escape. Not with you still alive and with DNA evidence and with what would be made of both at trial. You did the right thing, Ms. Statham. You did the only thing.”

She turned the photos faceup again. She began to go through them till she found the one she wanted. She didn’t switch its position so that he could look at it right side up, but he could see it was a picture of the little villa itself, an Englishman’s holiday dream destination with crimson bougainvillea tumbling over a wall, with flower beds brightly planted with Mediterranean blooms. A woman he recognised as Fiona Rhys lounged in the sun, dressed in crisp blue and white linen with a sun hat shading her face and her slim feet in sandals. She had a glass of white wine in her hand and with it she saluted the camera.

Rory said, “The night was quite warm. We’d kept the windows open. Without a sound he came in and there he was.” She flipped through more pictures, interior shots taken of the villa’s charms: the decorative tiles, the perfect white walls, the casual furniture, the vases of flowers brought inside to make it a home away from home. “At first,” she said quietly, “you think what you’ve been taught to think, what so many women are taught to think: If I just do nothing to rile him . . . if I just submit . . . if I don’t make things worse . . . But then you think of all the women who did just that and died anyway and something gets right inside you and you decide you won’t be one of them. I think that’s what happened to Fiona. It wasn’t in her to submit. I told her not to fight him. I said to her, ‘Fiona, don’t just don’t,’ but he had a knife at my throat and he’d managed to tie one of my arms to the bedpost and she . . .” Rory was silent for a moment, as if thinking about what she’d just said. “No,” she went on. “My arm wasn’t tied. He used a belt, something thin that they sold in the markets to tourists, something a woman would use with her trousers or a skirt and he’d punched more holes so he could get it quite tight and God he must have had so much practice. He said, ‘I mean business,’ in English, so he knew we were English and he’d been stalking us and waiting and we’d even been nude in the sun on the terrace and walking round the villa naked because we thought there was no one nearby.”

Across the room from them, Arlo seemed to sense Rory’s distress. He rose and came to her. He stood on hind legs, his paws on her knees, and she bent to him and rested her cheek against his head. She said, “He said, ‘I will cut her,’ to Fiona, and he did. Not with the tip of the knife but a slash across the front of me and there was blood . . . so
much . . . and you would think that would stop him from what he really wanted to do to me but it didn’t, of course. Fiona made a run for the bedroom door, probably for a weapon to match his, but he was on her. He didn’t cut her at first. He beat her and I could hear the sound—the grunting, the fists pounding into flesh and bone, the thrashing round—and then, of course, when she was whimpering from the pain and he’d broken her collarbone and her nose and three of her ribs—then he raped her. He beat her more and he raped her again and then I could hear the sound of the knife clattering on the floor and they struggled for it and God how she fought him but she couldn’t manage to . . . He got the knife and I could hear what he was doing to her and then he left her there on the floor. I thought she was dead. I thought, Nothing matters now. And then he came for me.”

“I am so profoundly sorry,” Lynley said. “But hear me well. You are not to blame for anything that happened that night.”

“He raped me . . . I don’t know. Four times? Five? It doesn’t matter and it didn’t matter because Fiona was dead. Only . . . she wasn’t, you see. God knows how she managed but she did. She got up from the floor, she
threw
herself on him—
how
did she do it?—because he was slashing at me and he was going to use the knife to . . . he was going to . . . the knife inside me . . .”

Lynley left the stool then. He had never felt so deeply ashamed merely to be a man.

Rory had begun to weep although she didn’t seem to be conscious that she was doing so. Lynley went round the desk to stand next to her chair, and then he knelt and took both of her hands in his. He wanted to remove her pain. More than that, he wanted to remove the memories that would doubtless haunt her straight to the grave. He could do neither, and so he did the only thing he could do, which was to listen to the rest of the story.

“She was so weak by then. She’d lost so much blood. But she threw herself on him anyway and he flailed at her with the knife and it was this . . . this moment and its ferocity that cut the belt that was holding me to the bedpost. He lost the knife then. Fiona got to it but she had virtually no strength while he . . . he was
driven
to do what he’d
intended to do and it was as if something coursed through him and made him superhuman, completely able to subdue two women who should have been able—”

“
No
,” Lynley said.

“He set on her again. He got the knife from her. He threw her down. And I could hear the sound of the knife hacking into her body—I still can hear that, Inspector, the . . . the horrible
meatiness
of the sound—and that was when I leapt from the window. I left her to him. I told myself I was going for help but I don’t know if that’s the truth of the matter and I’ll never know. So while he beat her and murdered her, I hid from him and I have to live with that. With that and with the fact that Fiona tried to save me while I couldn’t do the same for her.”

Lynley got to his feet and drew Rory to hers. He wanted to get her away from the desk, away from the photographs, away from anything that connected her mind to that night. He knew that the act of walking her over to the French windows and opening them and leading her outside to stand on the tiny balcony overlooking this simple London street was not going to achieve this end, but it was something and he needed to do something. He said to her, “Ms. Statham . . . Rory . . . People will have doubtless told you that you did the best you could that night. Indeed, you did the only thing you could. I expect Clare Abbott said that to you repeatedly.”

“She did.” Rory’s voice was low.

“So I want you to believe me now because I’m a cop and I know what I’m saying in this matter. Will you listen to me?” And when she nodded, “People . . . Clare . . . everyone . . . they will have been right.”

She used her arm to wipe her eyes. It was a childlike gesture that felt like a grip on Lynley’s heart. He wanted to say that she was loved by so many people, that those same people would have done what she had done, that her life had continued as a consequence and that was the important bit, but he knew that, despite the years that had passed since Fiona’s murder, Rory had so many miles to walk before she could forgive herself for the simple act of being human.

“You think you’re going to be able to vanquish this thing that’s
happening to you,” she said. “You’re going to do it by taking him down, by killing him if you must. There are two of you and one of him and even now people look at me and I see it in their eyes. Why were two of you not able to gain control over the situation? And I have no answer for that.”

“No one would have an answer for that.”

“I tell myself that I was in shock. I tell myself I
was
going for help. I tell myself I was out of my mind with terror. I tell myself anything and everything. But the truth is still the truth. I left him to kill her, to finish her off like she was . . . not even a dog, Inspector. I wouldn’t even have allowed that to be done to a dog.”

He had no response to this other than to say, “Please. You mustn’t . . .” but he knew what it was to lose someone to violence and to feel the weight of responsibility and the equal weight of guilt to be left among the living. In Rory’s case everything was so much more complicated by the difficulties inherent to her relationship with Fiona while in his own case he’d lost a beloved wife who’d known even in the last moments of consciousness as she lay bleeding into her own chest on the front step of their home exactly how beloved she was. There was a form of consolation in this, something onto which he’d been able to grasp in his deepest moments of despair. Rory did not have that in her relationship with Fiona. And he could not give it to her.

She turned to him. She smiled, it seemed, as best she could. She said, “So you see, Inspector. Clare saw as well. In her eyes—as in yours—I was a victim. In my own? That’s something I never shall know. I came to believe that if
she
wanted me, if I could make her mine—”

“Clare?”

“Yes. If I could—call it what you will—turn her somehow, then it would mean forgiveness.”

“But wasn’t that like attempting to take your definition of self from the unlikely? Or, even worse, the impossible?”

“It was,” she admitted. “But there you have it all the same.”