Hillerby saw the delight in her face, and felt a surge of jealousy. He wished he could listen in. There was a torrent of words from the caller. That much Hillerby could hear. But not what those words were.
‘I can explain, David,’ Bella was saying firmly. ‘Just calm down….’
But there seemed to be no prospect of David calming down. Hillerby belched loudly, angered by the intrusion. It had been going so well. Why did the creep have to ring now?
‘Why don’t you come round to my flat?’ Bella was saying. ‘We can talk about it over some food?’
The torrent stopped.
‘You live in Barns Road, don’t you David? Well you’re only a few minutes’ walk from my flat.’ She spoke calmly, soothingly, in a manner that was familiar to Hillerby. She used that tone with him sometimes, when she wanted him to do something for her.
‘Well that’s settled, then,’ she said, winding down the conversation. ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes.’
She looked across at Hillerby. ‘Sorry, Roy. My son is coming round. I think you’d better go.’
‘I thought.…’ But his sentence died before it could take form. She had spoken to him in the tones she had used with David. Softly, firmly, and – as he knew from experience – implacably.
‘I just need a pee first,’ he said, conceding defeat. ‘Then I’ll shove off.’
‘Thanks, Roy,’ she purred. ‘You’re a star.’
Once inside her flat, Ania Gorski dropped her bag on the floor and went to the bathroom. She locked the door and sat on the toilet.
There was no real need to lock the door. It was her flat, and only she had keys to it. Sometimes, she deliberately left the bathroom door not only unlocked, but wide open while she urinated. It felt good, liberating even. But not today. Today she slammed the door shut and locked it, and sat on the toilet. She didn’t urinate. She had not, she thought, had even a glass of water since she got out of bed. She should drink, she knew that, but her nausea was too overwhelming, and it was only as she sat there, that it finally began to recede. Locked inside her bathroom, locked inside her flat, she felt something approximating to safety. In the car with him, as he had driven her back to Oxford, she had been unable to think. She had shut her eyes in the hope that he would not try and talk to her, and had prayed for everything to be better – whatever that might be. She was not a praying person. She called herself a Catholic when required to fill in a form with the religion question on it, but that was as far as it went. For her parents and for her, that was all it had ever been.
She needed help. Not divine help, but practical, human help. That is to say, advice. Guidance. Someone to tell her: Do this or do that; dump him or – God forbid – don’t dump him; go to the police or don’t go to the police. There was only one person she could think of. She was older and surely wiser than her. She had always been kind to her. She was, she supposed, a friend. She would ring her.
She stood up. The nausea, she realized, had receded. She knew what the next step was, and that in itself was a huge relief. She unlocked the door, and went through into the living room. Her bag was where she had dropped it. She kicked off her shoes, and knelt down on the floor next to it, scrabbling around inside until she had found her mobile. She found the number she wanted, and rang it, oblivious to the irony that as she did so she was on her knees.
‘I’ve been praying.’ It was the first thing Mrs Holden said when her daughter reappeared at 5.35 p.m. that Sunday evening. She was sitting in the chair by the side of her hospital bed, and her face was beaming.
The detective inspector smiled w
eakly in reply. Such comments by her mother still had the capacity to catch her off guard. ‘What about?’
‘That the doctors will let me home tomorrow.’
‘What do the nurses think?’
‘Sister says they very likely will. They need the bed space, anyway. But there’s nothing like a bit of prayer to move things along.’
Her daughter nodded, but said nothing. Her mother’s tendency to speak in such terms was both disturbing and a little embarrassing. She looked around the ward, in case anyone should be listening. The woman opposite was asleep, the woman next to her was watching TV, and the fourth bed in the area was empty.
‘Well,’ her daughter said finally, ‘the question then is: how are we going to get you better? I think I’ll have to ask for some compassionate leave and—’
‘No, you most certainly will not!’
Susan Holden was taken aback by the sharpness of her mother’s intervention. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Because you’re in the middle of a case. And what do you think your Superintendent Collins will say? You’ve only just had six months off….’
‘My sergeant can handle the case. It’s only an old—’ Holden ground quickly to a halt, suddenly conscious of what she had started to say.
‘It’s only an old lady,’ her mother said quickly. ‘An old lady who would have died sooner or later anyway. Isn’t that what you mean? So it doesn’t matter if she was murdered or not.’
‘Of course it matters.’
But her mother had not finished. ‘Suppose it was me. Suppose I had been that old lady. Would I be worth only a sergeant?’