The Fifth Rapunzel Part 2

In the morning she was gone.

Rhoda caught the early morning train to London at Bristol Parkway station after hitching a lift in a milk lorry. She felt tired after a sleepless, busy, very profitable night. It had been extremely lucky that the boy was p.i.s.sed and she could search the premises without being disturbed, though her conscience had told her to tidy up the place as a kind of reparation before leaving him. She had looked in on him when dawn was breaking, a final look in case the booze had worn off or he'd been sick. He had been lying hunched up on his side, one arm supporting his head, the pillow on the floor. A restless sleeper like his father. The bed was by the window and there was enough light for her to see the growth of stubble on his chin. Peter had shaved twice a day. Once would do for the boy - for a while. He'd had an erection last night when she'd helped him undress, but hadn't seemed aware of it. Kept talking about cats. She smiled now, remembering. He was the kind of kid you wanted to protect, not thieve from. But stealing Lisa's diaries had been irresistible. She had found them hidden under a couple of Irish linen tablecloths, of all things, in the bottom drawer of a chest in her study - studio - whatever the extraordinary, mural dominated room was called. The top drawers held typewritten notes on the artistic style of various ill.u.s.trators of children's stories: A. W. Bayes, Monro S. Orr, Arthur B. Frost, Henry Holiday and John Tenniel. (Artistic and literary obsession with the grim works of Grimm?) The bottom drawer had been locked but the lock was loose and she had prised it open easily. The white tablecloths, a dusty beige along the folded edges, had been there a long time. And so had the diaries. She had flipped through some of the earliest ones and a few sentences had caught her attention here and there:

Nanny Ferguson loves Simon. Good. Nanny Fer-guson loves Peter. Good. Good. Peter screws Nanny Ferguson. Bad. Poor Nanny Ferguson. Poor little owl.

Peter in Hull. Nasty murder. Nasty job. Simon thinks Peter's job nasty, too. Sorry for Peter. Peter needs Simon. Simon needs Peter. Can't be sorry for Simon. Wish I could.

Simon six today. Took him to The Mount to see the loonies. Peter cross. Told him Hans Andersen's mum took little Hans to see the loonies, too. Loonies played with Hans. Hans liked them. Hans' mum cleaned the loony bin and weeded the garden. The Mount loonies didn't play with Simon, but Doctor Donaldson did.

Several months later:

Steve Donaldson says I'm okay - well, almost okay -but to keep on visiting. He has a patient called Shirley, he told me, who paints another patient called Mary-lou. Not on canvas. On flesh. Sunflower b.r.e.a.s.t.s with little brown nipples. Daisy chains around her throat. Sounds fun. Wanted to see. Steve wouldn't let me. "The privacy of the patients must be respected."Okay - but why tell me? Who cleans the bath afterwards?

Later still:

Much, much better after a period of being rotten. Simon to start boarding at new school. Feel great about this. He's nine. Good for him to get away. Will drive down to school with Peter. Mother plus father plus child. Have bought new suit - dark blue. Will try to say right things to Head - but what are they? What , do mothers say? Perhaps they just weep.

A week afterwards:

I didn't go. 1 couldn't. Looked at Simon's suitcase in the hall. His name on it. Everything very new. Simon's new shoes. Shining. Black. His hair looked very clean. Fair and straight. Melanie had washed it. Last au-pair job before leaving. Hope she will return during the holidays. Somebody must. Can't cope. Peter angry when I said he'd have to take Simon on his own. Swore at me. Simon heard. Looked upset but didn't cry. Never cries. Told him I'd post him some sweets. Must remember to do this. Hope he'll be happy. I mean this. Be happy, Simon. Please. I'll feel better if I know you're happy.

The early diaries were of no interest to Rhoda apart from sketching in Lisa's mental state, which was only relevant in a small degree to her mental state later. Which seemed to be normal. During Simon's early adolescence the diaries rarely mentioned him. There were crisp references to the research she was doing, mainly about social contacts with others with similar interests. A snide remark about Meg Maybridge caught Rhoda's eye:

Lunched with Meg Maybridge yesterday. She should bone up on her dates. She thought Rousseau's pal, Grimm, was one of the brothers Grimm. Laughed when 1 told her she was a century out. Said her attention had slipped and what did 1 want for dessert -lemon mousse? A hint I'm sharply acidic? Well - maybe. Do her English Lit. students ever trip her up - and does she care if they do?

Another reference to Meg was kinder and was written a few months later:

Monro S. Orr's ill.u.s.trations of Grimm's fairy tales are brilliant, Meg tells me. As if I didn't know! She gave me a very early edition she'd had all her life. More use to me than to her, she said, now that her son had grown up. It's not of any use to me, I've already got all his work. Didn't tell her. She's generous. Nice. Would have made a good mother for Simon. Can't imagine her sleeping with Peter, though. She isn't his style.

Style. Rhoda caught a glimpse of her reflection in the train window and smiled a bitter little smile. He was easy with compliments, Peter. On their first meeting, in a chilly carriage on a broken-down train somewhere south of Birmingham two winters ago, they had shared coffee and sandwiches. His sandwiches - hospital canteen. Her coffee - instant. Neither good, but better than nothing. He had praised the coffee. Polite, of course. And apologised for the sandwiches. Ham, dried up and too fat. Some while later, still stranded, he had praised what he called her "patient acceptance of an appallingly long wait". If the delay had been shorter they might not have exchanged names. Hers meant nothing to him, but he said that Rhoda was charmingly old-fashioned. Greek, wasn't it? Or Latin? She had heard of him. As a freelance journalist she had covered a few crime stories and his role as forensic pathologist had been mentioned from time to time. She had asked him if he was working on anything at the moment. He was always working on something, he said, the killing instinct was inborn from the time of Cain. It kept him in bread and b.u.t.ter. Speaking of which, would she like another of his revolting sandwiches? Smiling, she had declined. He had smiled back. The middle-aged, thick-set man with the stubby fingers which must have done all manner of appalling things was, she had thought then, extraordinarily attractive. Most women, she was to discover, did. Including her sister, Clare.

His wife's last two diaries were in her holdall. Two small leather-bound books, pushed in between the remains of the camera. What use would a photograph of the coffins have been - other than a macabre reminder of a relationship that had ended? There was no clue to violence there. But the diaries might reveal something about Clare. Where she was. And if she were not alive - what had happened to her.

Two days after the funeral, when Simon judged himself to be of sound mind and capable of clear thinking, he wrote to the medical school and said that he wouldn't be attending as a student in the autumn. Medicine wasn't for him. What career might eventually suit him, he didn't know. Nor, at that particular time, did he care. He kept the telephone disconnected in case Kester-Evans bothered him (time enough to tell him later when he felt strong enough to defend his action), and as there was no point in going back to school he cut the badge off his blazer and put it in the bin.

His next positive action was to buy a car. He had been given a modest little hatchback on his seventeenth birthday just over a year ago. His father's choice for him. Not a good one. He needed something fast. Until the Will was proved, or whatever the legal term was, he couldn't sell the family's second car - the Volvo - and add it to whatever he got for the hatchback, which wouldn't be much. Or he thought he couldn't. He knew he was due to inherit everything, but perhaps not immediately, so instead of purchasing a beautiful red B.M.W. coupe he made do with a second-hand, souped-up Lotus Eclat with a hefty mileage and pocketed enough on the trade-in of the hatchback to buy some suitable gear. Clothes had never interested him, but you couldn't drive that sort of car in boarding school clobber. And he was tired of sweatshirts and jeans. The lovat green suede jacket and matching cords he eventually chose might have better suited the B.M.W. A wrong choice pondered over took his mind off pain and was therapeutic. A couple of highly patterned jerseys, bright and cheerful, put colour in his cheeks and suited any kind of car. Happy for a while with the sort of trivia that puts death into perspective - a long way off for the healthy young - he roamed around Bristol, ate a highly spiced meal at an Indian restaurant, went to look at the Great Britain, down at the Docks and was called 'Sweetie' by a pretty little tart at the dockside. She didn't invite him to go home with her. He wondered if he would have if she had. The woman with the long dark hair lingered along the edges of his mind. She had come and gone like a dream. He only half believed in her.

A week later she came back.

Rhoda's approach this time was more carefully thought out. Simon mustn't be alarmed. She needed his co-operation and, for as long as possible, his goodwill.

He was hosing down his new car in the drive when she arrived. His back was to her and she watched him spraying the water under the wheel arches, dislodging cow muck. For a moment, and for the first time, she saw a physical resemblance to his father. The shoulder muscles, the way he flicked his wrists. When he was older, thickened out, the resemblance might become more obvious. She blanked the thought. Stay objective. He is a means to an end. Don't let memories colour anything. She said h.e.l.lo. And stepped smartly out of the way when he turned, startled, still hosing, and almost soaked her shoes.

He dropped the hose and water snaked across the gravel and ran into a bed of thick white alyssum, making the air pungent with the smell of flowers and wet manure. The sun shone brilliantly.

He went to turn off the tap and pressed his damp hands against his burning cheeks before returning to her. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, why did he blush so much? When would he stop?

She said h.e.l.lo again - and added "Simon". And smiled her winning, transforming smile. "Last time I was here," she went on smoothly, "we didn't have much opportunity to talk. I'm not at all sure I told you my name. It's Rhoda. Rhoda Osborne."

He nearly said how do you do, but that would have been too ridiculous. This woman had seen him naked - well, maybe not quite, he wasn't sure - and had put him to bed. He mumbled something about being sorry.

"Whatever for?"

"I'd been drinking."

"And why not?"

"Even so ..."

"It's all right."

She went over and admired the car, giving him time to compose himself. "A nippy little job. Yours?" "Yes. A 521 twin-cam."

She made an approving noise. "Sounds good. I don't know what it means. No, don't tell me, I still wouldn't know. Pretty fast?"

"Yes. Not much chance to speed around here, though."

"But overtakes well?"

"Well enough." And you've smoothed me down enough. I think I've stopped blushing. I was wearing my father's pyjamas. Christ! And now I want to laugh. Oh, G.o.d, I mustn't.

He grinned suddenly and once again she saw his father in him. And couldn't smile back.

"Look," she said gently, "do you think we could go inside and talk awhile?"

He had been using the back entrance and she followed him directly into the kitchen which had reverted to its original state. Didn't he ever wash up? His father had been tidy. And what had possessed him to connect his father's answering machine to the telephone? Peter's rich, deep voice saying calmly that he was away at the moment, but would be back soon, and please to leave a message, had sent shock waves through her. Followed by anger. And then amus.e.m.e.nt. What kind of son had the Bradshaws sp.a.w.ned? Someone wickedly insensitive? Or had he merely forgotten to wipe the tape?

Lisa's voice would have interested her. The focus was on Lisa. She was here to collect evidence - of what, she wasn't sure. A pattern would form. As yet the strands were nebulous, like a shadowy web building slowly in a dark recess.

Simon asked her if she would like a cup of tea - or a gin and tonic - or something?

"If the 'or something' could be coffee - black - then yes, please. And I don't mind if it's instant."

He opened one of the kitchen cupboards. "There's a percolator somewhere."

"Don't bother. It's quicker out of a jar."

"My mother ..." he began, stopped. What he had begun to say about his mother wasn't important. One of the few good things she could do was to make good coffee. And one of the many bad things he could do was to make trite conversation, if he didn't watch himself. And fumble and mumble and drop the spoon.

And ...

And why the h.e.l.l was she here?

His gaucherie warmed her towards him. She had known other boys in their late teens, smooth young sophisticates, self-a.s.sured, level-headed sixth formers about to embark on university life. Young men she'd never refer to as kids. But then the genes were different. And the environment, in Simon's case, bizarre. "I didn't mean to call on you unannounced," she said, "but there seemed to be something wrong with my phone."

He blushed, deeply embarra.s.sed but grateful for the lie. As a way of fobbing off Kester-Evans it had seemed amusing. It wasn't, of course, it was appalling.

He tried to explain. "I disconnected the phone, but someone sent a telephone engineer around ... and then ... well, I ... you see, I get bothered by people who think I can't manage and want to come and help, and then Kester-Evans ... my headmaster ... wants me back at school ... and he's the one I particularly don't want to talk to ... and, well, that's it, I mean ..." He returned to the coffee making, his blush slowly subsiding. "Please do sit down." It was stiff. Very polite. She sat at the kitchen table where Maybridge had sat not so long ago. Maybridge would have given him good counselling. Rhoda should have given him the same, plus the return ticket to school. Instead, she accepted the coffee and asked for sugar. "Brown for preference."

"I haven't any."

"It doesn't matter. White will do."

They sat in a silence that wasn't companionable. He was aware that she was studying him and drank his coffee, which he hadn't wanted, in hot nervous gulps.

"People," she said soothingly, "don't matter a lot. I mean outsiders. They're not important enough to worry you. Ignore them. Tell them to p.i.s.s off." She grinned, "Sorry, awfully rude?"

He grinned back. Relaxed. "Probably not rude enough. I'll tell them I'm rabid." He added: "Actually, I have changed the tape. Just repeated what my father said."

She shrugged. Pity. She would have liked to hear Peter's voice again.

"I've chucked in my place at medical school," he told her.

"For a good reason?" "I never wanted to go." "I can't think of a better." "My father wanted it for me." Oh no, laddie, she thought, he didn't. On the few occasions your father mentioned you he said you were battling your way through a survival course, and G.o.d knew he hoped you'd be happy at the end of it. Whatever you did.

"Your father wanted you to be happy." It was spoken on impulse, because it needed to be said.

He remembered that she had spoken his father's name that night when she had sat on his bed. "You knew my father?"

"Yes." She didn't look at him but glanced up at the shelf of dark blue pottery jugs and plates arranged for effect over the work-top. Lisa's feminine touch. "I'm really here to talk about your mother."

He froze a little. Withdrew. She noticed. This wasn't going to be easy. The well-rehea.r.s.ed cover story had to be good.

That it was a witch's brew of fact and fiction, based partly on the diaries she had read, he wasn't to know. It was plausible. She was a freelance journalist, she told him. (True.) When Lisa's book on nineteenth-century ill.u.s.trators had been published some while ago she had been introduced to her at a publisher's party. (False.) The book had been well received, but by a limited readership. (True.) The editor of one of the Sundays had suggested to her that an article on Lisa's artistic and literary ability would be of interest, particularly now, and had invited her to write it. (False.) "1 would like to agree, Simon. But not without your permission. I would write it very sensitively. Let you see it at every stage. Your father had been a public figure most of his life but she was very much in the background. She deserved more acknowledgment than she had. Looking at it commercially, there would be renewed interest in her book. It would sell more. Good for you financially." She paused. A wrong move? Money, she sensed, wouldn't woo him. Try again. Soften it. "I would write nothing hurtful. Nothing derogatory. I'd just try to give her her rightful place-up front in the art world. A kind of memorial to a woman who was brilliant but never had the accolade she deserved." She hesitated, feeling for the right words. "People like Lisa aren't easy to know. Artists and writers are difficult people. Self-absorbed to some extent. Incapable sometimes of showing their feelings. They can be misjudged, even by their own families. It takes one to know one. I felt I knew her in that brief time we met, She said she found it difficult to express affection - that she worked out her emotions mostly on canvas."

Rhoda clenched her hands under the table. Careful, Going too far. What sort of affection was shown on that mural upstairs? Precious little. Okay - so it was in the style of someone else - but it was ninety percent Lisa. And you've read most of the early diaries. It's no use trying to tell this boy that she loved him. She was as weird as h.e.l.l. And he knows it. Try putting a little guilt on him: "You've read her book, of course?" He shook his head.

"Why not? You must be awfully proud of her?" He was silent. She applied salve. "Possibly you were too young to appreciate it when it was published. You're not now. Read it, Simon, it's terrific." It was an exaggeration. It was a good, well-researched book, cleverly ill.u.s.trated. It would bore him, probably, but it wouldn't upset him. Lisa, at the time of writing it, had been totally sane.

But how sane had she been when Clare had walked into her life and into Peter's bed? And then gone missing?

When the son of an old friend lets a stranger into his home there's not much you can do about it, Maybridge pointed out to his wife. "Simon is old enough to do as he likes," Meg agreed. But age couldn't be measured in years and Simon's naivety worried her. Journalists don't move in on the bereaved within a couple of weeks of the funeral - actually move in and live in the house - with some weak story about researching background. No respectable newspaper or magazine would sanction it.

Or was she, in turn, being naive? How far would the Press go for a story? Too far, she had to concede, for a story that was hot and immediate. Which this wasn't. Rhoda Osborne was a freelance journalist, Simon had told her, who wanted to write about his mother. It was convenient for her to stay with him so that she could look through his mother's art work and ma.n.u.scripts. In return she would cook him his meals. It wouldn't be for long. Meg had called to see how he was getting on and had been startled by what Simon, speaking defensively, had told her. Carefully keeping her voice neutral, she had asked if she might meet her. Sometime when she wasn't working, Simon had hedged. "She's up in my mother's studio, taking notes. I mustn't disturb her."

"My immediate response to that," Meg told Maybridge, "was to say, 'Mustn't you? In your own home, too. How odd!' And then he blushed and was so bothered about blushing that he wandered over to the window and stared out across the garden towards the orchard. 'She likes the almond tree,' he said. 'My mother liked it, too. Used to sit there a lot. 'How do you follow that? With Grimm's horror story?"Maybridge, whose knowledge of Grimm was slight, didn't know what she was talking about. He raised an enquiring eyebrow. "A particularly nasty tale about the decapitation of a child," Meg explained. "The lid of a chest full of apples is dropped on him when he looks inside - by his villain- ous stepmother. Had it been his natural mother it would have been worse. The body is buried under the almond tree. A bird squawks a lament every few pages. Lisa has a painting of the bird in her studio." "Oh," said Maybridge.

"Given Lisa's state of mind," Meg went on, "researching Grimm couldn't have done her much good. Doctor Donaldson should have fed her a diet of Enid Blyton. Safe, nice, twee, little Noddy."

Maybridge, adrift from the original subject, steered back to it. Simon might be bedding a girlfriend, he suggested, and had made up the story about the journalist. And it was handy the girl was cooking his meals. If he were being hara.s.sed, he would have said so. As for a stupid yarn about an almond tree and decapitation, what about all those blood and guts stories David had thrived on when he was a kid? They hadn't done him any harm.

"Debatable," Meg said drily. "He still reads Stephen King."

Maybridge, unwilling to be drawn into a discussion on the literary merit, or lack of it, of the horror genre -personally he liked King, too, and read him when Meg wasn't around - went out to do some gardening.

The mild spring had brought on the roses and some of the bushes needed de-budding. A necessary act of decapitation to help the survivors to bloom. Superintendent Claxby would draw an a.n.a.logy there, he thought, as he snipped away with his secateurs, especially if Sergeant Radwell were around. A discussion about the overcrowding of prisons had prompted Radwell, normally tactful and reticent, to state with some heat.that anyone advocating the death penalty must be sick. "Murder is the ultimate atrocity," he'd dared tell Claxby, "especially when committed by the state." Claxby, unruffled, had drawn the sign of the cross over his head and murmured, "Pax vobisc.u.m. Now hie thee to a monastery - or call me 'sir'." The 'sir had been whispered through gritted teeth and Claxby had smiled. "Pompous little p.r.i.c.k," he'd said to Maybridge later. Maybridge, as always, had defended him. Mostly because he agreed with him. But how far could compa.s.sion be extended? He'd felt none for the Bible-quoting serial strangler that Bradshaw's evidence had nailed. A life sentence in Hixon's case should mean just that, and probably would.

Maybridge recalled Hixon's first murder - the strangling of a prost.i.tute in the vault of one of Bristol's war-damaged churches, known locally to some of the winos who dossed down there as the Church of the Nazarene. The structure, beyond repair, had been left open to the sky, a grey elegance of upthrusting stones softened by ivy and clumps of sedum. The vault, in most places intact, had at one time been the repository of bra.s.ses let into the floor. These had been cleared away and the cavities filled with rubble. As a temporary shelter for tramps the vault was marginally better than sleeping under a bridge, though almost as cold. After the discovery of the body they gave it a miss for a while. Now most of them were back. A strangled prost.i.tute called Louise, her hair plaited and tied around her neck like a noose, might still haunt the sensitive, but on a pouring wet night she was better forgotten. Old Alf Whitman had found her. "A stiff at St Naz," he'd told the desk officer at the nearest police station. The officer, who had never heard of St Naz, believed, rightly, that the old fellow was drunk. Whitman, not sufficiently drunk to stop trying and not sober enough to be lucid, had wept with exasperation, tinged with terror, before finally getting through. "And I didn't do it," he'd added. "Aw, Jeeze G.o.d - t'wasn't me."

Whitman had avoided being called as a witness at the trial by the simple expedient of dying, aged seventy-four, of a liver infection in Bristol Royal Infirmary. One of Hixon's relatives - well, probably one of Hixon's relatives - had sent a wreath. The only one. Bronze chrysanthemums. The typed message had been:

May the Lord receive you with joy.

C.H.

Maybridge smiled wryly at the recollection. Hixon mad? Well, maybe. But not mad enough to convince the psychiatrists, and not sane enough to be careful. When an insurance clerk who is also a lay preacher and an apparently happily married man embarks on a mission to rid the world of sleaze (his word), he shouldn't sample the product first. In his case, five products. All under thirty, most pretty, none deserving to die.

Doctor Donaldson, who was supposed to be an expert in matters of the mind, had attended the trial and heard Hixon's final outburst. "The fire of fanaticism," he'd observed, "stoked by l.u.s.t.".It probably summed it up.