Frances Fyfield - Trial by Fire

Antony felt the marks on his face, almost gone but still noticeable, the stigma of shame.

Christ, what a cat; more like a tiger, hurling herself at him, but all the same, he should never have struck back, never used conduct unbecoming to any kind of gentleman.

Christine readjusted her position, ascending slowly and reluctantly from sleep, muttered, and smiled at him, one eye open. 'Feel like an old lady,' she said. 'Tell me when it's tomorrow and hand me a stick to get upstairs. Can't manage on my own.' The eye closed; she dozed as he stroked her pale hair, movements involuntary to hide the sudden heaving of heart, which was deafening to his own ears. Stick, she had said. Hand me a stick. The word 'stick' beat against his skull like a gong.

Walking stick, his own, an affectation since teenage years and his first reading of Wordsworth striding about the Lake District and Keats stirring autumn leaves. Milton leaning on one in his blindness. He had clasped his walking stick like a talisman through his student days of floppy bow ties, floppier hair, and caped coats; kept it now to accompany the heavy cords, designer hiking boots, and poisonous French cigarettes he carried to school. The stick was his adolescent symbol, the adult prop to individuality, and the staff room joke.

Stick. Walking stick. He looked around the room wildly. Where was it? Thrust into a corner here? In his own untidy house? In his car? Probably in his car. Surely in the back of his car where it lay whenever he forgot it, as he had forgotten it often since Christine, forgotten it entirely over the last twelve days. Antony had a vision of the stick, the carved wooden handle

– an elephant's head, quite inappropriately – smooth on the top from years of use, with a rubber ferrule that had perished and needed replacement.

Everything he had tried to blank from his mind rose like scum on a pond: he heard the swish of the stick as he walked through trees, remembered gripping it tighter as she had moved toward him, shut his eyes and attempted one more time to see it lying in the back of the Morris earlier that evening, failed. There was no denying the last place he had carried that stick, the last thing he had done with it.

Ten-thirty, dark. Helen bound the files together with white tape, each complete, annotated with notes, consigned to memory in preparation for Monday morning. No matter how much she did in her office, homework always remained for the peaceful hours when she could give scrupulous attention to detail. She never made a conscious demarcation zone between home and work. If you were a lawyer, you were one all the time: nothing stopped when you closed the office door.

She looked at the room and the empty eye of the television, content with the evening's work, peaceful without Bailey. Well, my man, I haven't had a hard week, but I think for once I shan't wait up for you. Surely you're allowed home before midnight after last night and the night before? I understand completely: I'd be the same in your shoes, but it doesn't stop me missing you by this time of night.

All depends,' Bailey had said. 'whether we get any leads on this thing or not. Might know who she is, or someone might tell us. She wasn't wearing so much as an earring. No fingerprints left, but there's always the teeth. See how we go.'

To be fair, he had telephoned once about seven o'clock. Someone, he said, had reported a missing wife, same age as this poor body in the mortuary. Nothing, really, only a disappearance coinciding with a death. Well, something perhaps. Oh, and a daughter, tugging his arm, saying Mr Bailey, let me tell you something: she was always going to those woods.

With a man, she went with my teacher, Mr Bailey; I thought you ought to know. My father doesn't know, Mr Bailey. Please don't say I told you. Poor child. Bailey, coolest man in the world, was always a sucker for girl children, especially those the age his own might have been had she lived beyond three months.

For these, he suspended judgement and never got it back. What man? I'll tell you that, too. I'm almost grown up, and I've been so worried. And Superintendent Bailey, knowing the full extent of Helen's Branston acquaintance, recognizing the name of Antony Sumner, had confined himself to telling Helen he was likely to be very late indeed. Don't stay awake for me, darling; we'll try to do something interesting tomorrow. Hearing a gurgle of suggestive laughter in her voice, keeping out of his own the yearning to be home.

Now, at midnight, Helen in bed, shocked by the mean imperative sound of the miniature phone by the side of it, wondering if the owners of this ghastly house used to phone their offices from it at dawn, thinking they probably did – then wide awake when she heard not Bailey's apologetic tones, but the shrill, hysterical voice of Christine Summerfield.

`Helen, you bitch, you knew, you must have known. Why did you let me think it would be all right? How could you let me go home? How could you say nothing? What a fool I feel, never mind the rest. Why did you do that?'

`Do what? Calm down, Chris. I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.

Whatever's the matter? Chris, don't cry. What's the matter? Come on, pet, tell me. I'm in the dark. Please tell me. I honestly don't know.'

The sobbing on the other end of the line dropped an octave, subsided into furious gulps. Then Christine summoned up fury in words, stopped, started, ended in a voice of drab sadness. 'Oh, maybe you didn't. I don't know. I don't know anything. I don't know why the hell I'm talking to you at all. I only know that your bloody man, your bloody paramour of a bloody copper, your bloody bandit of a fascist pig, has just come here and very politely removed Antony to the comfort of Waltham Police Station for assistance with his inquiries into a murder. That woman Antony met. She's dead. The married mistress I told you about so trustingly because I was worried. The one who gave him the scratches. Now who the fuck told Bailey?'

I don't know,' said Helen firmly, 'but it wasn't me. I might have told him if I'd had the chance, but I haven't seen him. Calm down.'

The sobbing subsided. 'Oh, God, Helen, you're the last person I should ask, but what should I do? What the fucking hell should I do?'

`Get him a lawyer,' said Helen crisply. 'I'll give you the number of the only one I know who lives in Branston. He's as good as any. Call him and then go to the station, wait for him, and ask him to see Antony; take anything you think he might need. And just be there. Got that?'

`Yes,' said Christine, doubtful and weary. 'Give me the number.' Then, as an afterthought, product of emotion: 'I hate you both.'

Helen ground her teeth, resigned herself to a sleepless night. She had just catapulted one pompous and obstructive solicitor into the middle of Bailey's investigation, an act of dubious assistance to him, something that was bound to slow him down. She had instructed Christine how best to make a nuisance of herself because she believed that the legal rights of all people were sacrosanct, whatever they might have done. She had also acted in the interests of a friendship that had become precious to her and that had been mutilated, probably beyond repair, by this evening's work.

Bailey would not have sprung Antony Sumner from the house of a lover in the middle of the evening had he not believed there was something important to ask him. Whatever the outcome of the interrogation, her acquaintance with Christine Summerfield was unlikely to recover. She would also have to see how far Bailey's tolerance in civil liberties extended when it was she who had prescribed them in the full knowledge that Sumner might be too shocked to find out for himself. 'Damn your eyes, Geoffrey Bailey. Damn your eyes. Poor Christine.' She was speaking to herself, surprised to find the anger.