Blind Date (15 page)

The man scoffed. “Oh is it,
these days?”
he mimicked. “Not in mine, it wasn't. You picked her up on a street corner, threw her in the back of the car and bought her a drink. No-one yelled rape either. What was I saying?”

“The agency. Named?”

“Something poncey. Select Friends.” He drank water.

“The woman who ran the place clinched it for me. She said, yes, our man had come along to enrol. She'd fixed him up with one date who had complained. Not only was he undersized and sweaty, his talk was filthy. She called him in, read him the riot act, gave him back his money and showed him the door. He threatened to bash her head in.” He shook his head. “Small men, so aggressive, aren't they?”

As if big men were not. That was what Joe had in common with the man he faced: he was aware it was his passport to the confidences he was given, even though the process of getting him to come across with unadorned truth had so far been akin to pulling teeth. Even slumped in his chair, the man knew all about being big and clumsy and the phenomenon of smaller men either running away, regarding him as a challenge or wanting to use him as a battering ram. Jenkins, now relegated to the fifth division of administration to see out his time, would never have trusted a small man. Diminished stature would have made him untrustworthy, like a lad with eyes too close together.

It was like
an elaborate dance, with Jenkins, both of them circling one another: Jenkins wanting a partner for his own, obscure purposes and yet resenting him at the same time.

“Why don't you ask Elisabeth all this stuff, instead of asking me?”

“She wouldn't tell me. She's thrown me out.”

Jenkins grunted. “You did well to get so far. Try flowers, boy, works every time, try flowers. It makes ‘em love you.”

“What really happened to Jack?” Joe asked. “What did you do to him?”

“Get stuffed, Joe. You know how it was, boy. You know perfectly well. He fell in love.”

“I mean what happened to his murder charge? I was never entirely clear.”

“Oh, that? Why do you so love to make an old man go over old ground? The murder charge failed for two reasons. Lizzie got him bang to rights on tape with all the right kind of fantasies. Had him telling her how he wanted to off a woman in exactly the same way Emma had been offed, only smothering her and buggering her at the same time. He even mentioned a plastic sack, although he preferred the idea of a blanket, more refined. Softer, you see, kinder.”

“Emma Davey wasn't buggered.”

“No, he hadn't got around to that.”

“Well
…” Joe looked around, uncomfortable. He wondered what Jenkins ate.

“Lizzie also got out of him a fairly accurate description of what the body would look like.” Jenkins was shouting. “Got him guessing how many kicks it would take to shatter a skull. How hard you have to grind your heel into the neck to crush the thorax. The position in which she would lie when it was finished. Oh, he'd thought about it a lot.” He seemed to realize he was shouting, lowered his voice.

“Two reasons why it failed, like I said. The judge took the view at the pretrial that Lizzie had trapped him. Lured him, seduced him, blow-jobbed him senseless, played havoc with his feelings and his prick, so that he would have said anything she suggested … anything. So nothing he did say was reliable. It was gross entrapment, he said. Darling soul. He was probably thinking of what he would do if he got his own balls tickled.”

Another cigarette: another pause. Joe waited.

“And you know the rest, don't you? It
might
have been a purely legal decision, but it wasn't, quite. After Jack was charged, he went to his brief with a photograph. One of our best. An onsite police photo in glorious technicolour of poor Emma in her final, foetal curl.” Jenkins described a curled question mark with his cigarette. “How the hell he got hold of it, God only knows … we're supposed to guard them like gold dust, but it raised the fatal question. Did Jack know what she looked like because he'd seen the damage he'd done to her himself, which was
our
case, or did he know because he'd seen a happy snap of the same occasion? The photo clinched it. That was the end, but not before Lizzie was branded. And even though no-one could work out
when
the little shit had got hold of the picture. Was it
before
he told Lizzie how he imagined Emma had looked, or after?”

“You
showed
me
the photos,” Joe murmured.

“So I did, boy. But you were an expert of sorts and you were on our side. My unofficial helper.” He sank further into the chair. “Or at least you were, before either of us knew Jack's name.”

“Y
ou made me love you …” The words of the song rang through Elisabeth's head like distant bells. How had she made the suspect love her? With a man like this creature—lonely, immature, unattractive and insecure, prone to bouts of sentiment and anger because he did not understand anything except hope—it had been easy. Because it was so false. “Look,” she had said to him as they strolled along the Embankment, “I like you, but we have to get to know one another. I can't bear anything rushed: it always goes wrong and I can't bear to have my heart broken all over again. We have to be friends first. We have to know how the little black heart of the other one beats, what the mind thinks … what we both want. When we have no secrets, we can be intimate; not before.” It sounded then, as she spoke it, against the background of the river and the traffic, the most specious, adolescent rubbish, and she was almost ashamed to hear it coming out of her mouth, but Jack seemed to listen like a breathless little pupil in school, addressed by teacher for the first time and on the brink of discovery. On that November night he had clasped her cold hand between his two warm ones, stared and nodded agreement.

“I have fantasies,” he murmured. “Terrible dreams of sex with faceless persons, dreams of what I would do if they wanted.”

“So do I,” she had promised, “the same, the very same.” I want to know that the man who loves me is powerful enough to kill. Could you do that, lover? Could you? Tell Patsy. C'mon. Tell. He wanted to be led: he begged for leadership and guidance. “All this time,” he said, “he had needed someone older and wiser, a woman rather than a girl,” and Elisabeth had stood there with his breath warming her face, letting him touch her, leaning into him while the tape recorder worked to perfection. She hated him, hated his wide brown eyes, weak chin and soft, soft hands. “Goodnight, my friend,” she had told him and kissed him on the cheek. She would always volunteer affection; it was easier if she touched him first, it gave her more control.

He would
boast of what he had done, Jenkins had promised. If he was proud of it, he would boast, or, if he were ashamed, he would seek to justify it, but he would not, in an atmosphere of trust, keep it to himself.

The breeze from the river was becoming cold. Elisabeth had walked and sat through one whole cycle of the tide, telling herself it was over. All over and done and dead and forgotten, and now the evening crowd was coming out to play, their eager faces lit with predatory anticipation. She could see no innocent pleasure in the faces as she watched a couple meet and embrace. So easy to lie.

You have lost your eye for beauty, child.
You can only see ugliness.

W
hen she reached her own door in the shade of the tower, she felt for the heavy key she wore tucked into her belt and then noticed how the grounds to the side looked so much tidier with the grass out. The flowers which she had left to their fate this morning were gone.

She had not wanted them this morning: she was sickened by flowers, but this evening, she did. And she wanted to know who had sent them. She could put them on Jack's grave; making amends for something.

J
enkins had run out of cigarettes. Joe had cigarettes, so he was tolerable for longer. Jenkins could sound drunk, even when sober like this, talking almost aimlessly.

“Look,
why was she so upset? No, when did she get upset? She was a police officer, not an avenging angel. The suspect, greasy little man, tells her things. Fantasies about subduing a woman, hiding her face. Fucking a body without a head. A woman as compliant as a corpse but not dead, yet. Then he tells her about how he
imagined
the body of his dead friend Emma would have looked … beautiful and blurred in death. ‘A crushed gem,' in his words … a shattered pearl. Can you shatter a pearl? Uncannily accurate. He must have known. Or had a psychic imagination. It was all on the very tail end of the tapes. We arrested him.”

The cigarette worked as booze would have worked on Joe. The answers, half murmurs, halting and incomplete, lasted as long as the cigarette was half done, anxiety setting in towards the end, so Joe left the open packet on the table.

“
When
was she upset? Oh, when they confronted one another. Want to see? I've got the video. No, not that one, the one on the left. Stick it in, go on.”

Joe inserted the video, watched the lighting of another cigarette. A blurring of the screen, a blush of images, a clear picture.

Man in plastic seat in featureless room. Door opens. Enter handsome woman: man leaps up, is restrained. The sound was low, muttered words. They hold him gently, Jenkins and another, smaller man, meaty hands and thin hands pinning down each of his shoulders, this little squire with a pudgy face and thinning hair. If the pressure of their palms caused pain, he did not show it. Inside a second, the restraint was necessary to hold him not down, but upright as he slumped forward. Weeping inconsolably, stretching one hand towards her, pleading. Elisabeth Kennedy, straight as a piece of pipe, hands clasped behind her back, implacable and calm. Joe could have hated anyone as immovable as this, felt himself flinch.

Jenkins laughed
softly.

“But she wasn't really like that. Oh yes, God alone knows what she had done to him. She'd begun and ended by hating him, which meant there was nothing she wouldn't, or couldn't do. She could be ruthless.” He pointed a piece of bamboo cane at his telly sceen. Joe could see him using it, to thrash.

“Revenge was her motive. She probably slept with him when the tape was off, though he never said so. ‘I love you,' he kept on saying, ‘you made me love you.' And then she lost it a bit, although that didn't show either. She adored that sister of hers, but dear old Lizzie, revenge weren't her dish. He was only a sad, sick little man, she told me, off the fucking record: and I said you're all cunt and shout, Lizzie. You're supposed to be the hard one, try. All that fucking while, she was soft as butter. If it were all about forgiveness, she would have forgiven him. We went on with it, but the judge, he doesn't forgive Lizzie. He's right. Could have been wrong. Easy.”

Coffee, water, a biscuit. Two minutes between cigarettes, the voice rich and tired.

“He called it deception of the grossest kind. Not just a trap, but the grossest. He wasn't a total fool, that judge. He got it clear that our naive little pervert was gobsmacked by Lizzie. Would have done anything. Said anything.

“How
did
he know how the body looked? How did he really know? Was it the photo, or had he always known?”

Jenkins'
laughter was loud. It reverberated round the room. “Who knows? I fucking don't.”

He nodded, as if Joe was management in need of convincing. “We weren't careful enough with those photos.”

“Who gave it to him?”

“Someone with a chance. Anyone.”

“But did he do it? Jack, our suspect, did he he do it?”

“You do go on. He might have done. After the judge ruled and he was as good as acquitted, the silly little fucker chucked himself in the river. Never listen to judges. Lizzie's never been the same.”

He coughed his ghastly cough. “So who showed him the photo, fucked our case? Fucked up Lizzie's life? Thank God I could blame it all on that.”

He was restless. Pointed the index finger of the heavy hand Joe had seen on the screen.

“There were dozens of photos, boy. Dozens of people to put one in a pocket. Even you. I let you see them. Could have been you, boy. Could have been you. You boys and we men, we stick together. It could have been you. You'd fingered your friend Jack without knowing it. Felt guilty, didn't you? It could have been you. Go home, Joe. Go home, wherever that is.”

M
idnight saw Patsy and Hazel huddled together in Patsy's flat. Hours of shocked waiting around, the notation of statements, the trip back to the office to search Angela's desk space, which had been as neat and tidy as a thoroughbred's kennel. Bit obsessive, was she? No, only well trained, a person who kept her life in control and secretly wished it was otherwise. Not a dreamer, not in particular, no. She was pleasant: that was what she was; sweet and biddable and anxious to please and frustrating, because somewhere inside an alternative person was waiting to get out, you know? What kind of person? Oh, I don't quite know, but someone who might realize that she was enviable, powerful even, with her efficient brain, and because she was so pretty; so very, very pretty.

Did you
try and influence her? Yes: that was our fault; no, it wasn't. She was our discovery; we made her over for a magazine article. You know the sort of thing, turning a pigeon into a swan, we usually do it in-house. No, it wasn't our responsibility; she liked it. She wanted to turn into a swan.

Once home, reluctant to part, they amazed themselves by the inefficiency of the processes they had witnessed. Jesus, what clods, apart from the woman, all of them running around, trying to make out they were busy, when all the time, nothing seemed to happen. But it was empty rage. Rage and guilt, trying to tell themselves that they were not, at any remove, to blame. Or that they could have altered anything by being there sooner, perhaps on the Friday or Saturday, long before the insects. Miserable, furious, stunned, they were straight into the booze, voraciously hungry but not able to eat, in need of drunkeness, but not quite able to achieve it.