I stared at them blankly. Susie was dead? “How?”
Tommy gave me an old-fashioned look which said I should know better than to ask, and consulted his notebook again. “Obviously we can't discuss details, but I can tell you we're now involved in a murder enquiry,” he allowed. “We understand you were one of the last people to see her alive, so we need to know all of what you can remember about Saturday night.”
I told them everything then, of course I did. About rescuing Clare from Susie's attack, about Marc Quinn stepping in to deal with her. “He told us he'd thrown her out of the club, and I didn't see her again for the rest of the evening,” I finished.
“And her boyfriend, this Tony, you said he seemed pretty upset with her?” the younger one asked.
“Highly pissed off, but he didn't leave when Susie did. I don't know when she was killed, but I saw him again a couple of times later on. Once about half an hour after she'd been chucked out. He was consoling himself by chatting up a red-head in the lower bar. When Clare and I left at about quarter to midnight the pair of them were staggering into a taxi, giving each other a pretty good impression of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was a private hire cab, I think, a blue Cavalier. I didn't notice which firm, sorry.”
“That's OK, we can check with the club. They would have had to call it from there.” He made scribbled notes, then backtracked to the previous page. “So, you said Mr Quinn threw Miss Hollins out and then came to speak to you? How long was he with you?”
I frowned, considering. “He was there about ten minutes or so. Then he disappeared and I didn't see him again until just after Dave had done his final set. That's when they presented Clare with her karaoke prize. We left shortly after that.”
“That would be Dave Clemmens, who was the DJ in charge of the karaoke, right?”
I nodded.
“And what about you? Where did you go when you left the New Adelphi Club?”
“Can I prove my whereabouts, you mean?” I demanded. “Why, do you think I killed her?” I held his gaze levelly.
“No, Miss Fox,” he said, with a grim smile. “I don't.”
I didn't understand exactly what he meant by that until later, after the police had gone, when I heard the regional report on the afternoon news. They didn't name her, of course, but I don't think there was more than one murder of a young woman in the area for them to go at.
Details were sketchy, but the reason I wasn't on the suspect list was immediately obvious. I just wasn't equipped for it. In addition to having her throat half cut and being beaten to death, Susie Hollins had been repeatedly and viciously raped.
Four
Clare rang me later that evening. The police had been to see her, too, and she was as stunned as I was by the whole thing. I let her talk it through without major interruptions. To let her equilibrium right itself.
“I can't help feeling guilty,” she finished, illogically. “I mean, it was sort of because of me that Susie got chucked out, and if she hadn't . . .” Her voice tailed off uncertainly.
“Oh Clare, don't even think about that,” I told her. “Susie made her own choices. She just made some bad ones. Getting thrown out of the club was her fault, not yours. You didn't provoke her. And she could have just got herself a cab home.”
“I know, you're right,” she said, sounding forlorn. “I just feel really bad about it.” She paused, sighing. “I'm glad you were there, though.”
“That's OK,” I said. I was standing leaning against one of the deep set windows in the flat, watching the lights of the traffic on the other side of the river, streaming across Greyhound Bridge towards Morecambe. The movement was soothing, hypnotic in its droning regularity.
I took another swig from a bottle of cloudy wheat beer I'd found as a pleasant surprise lurking in the salad drawer at the bottom of the fridge. “So, how's the black eye?”
“Oh, don't. Jacob's been giving me stick about that ever since, but it covers up all right. One of the boys on the crime desk wanted to interview me about my little fracas with Susie as a side story for the next issue, by the way,” she added with an audible grimace. “He not only wanted to get Photographic to take pictures of me without make-up, but said he'd get the art department to touch it up and make it look like a really worthwhile bruise. Cheeky bastards. I told them you were the one they should be talking to.”
I spat most of the mouthful of beer I'd been about to swallow back into the bottle. “Oh no,” I said, spluttering. “I can just see the way they'd write the story and I can quite do without that kind of publicity, thank you very much!”
“Oh come on, Charlie, it might give business a boost. After all, there should be hordes of women who want to learn self-defence after this. You'll be turning them away in their hundreds.”
The laughter in her voice was infectious and I couldn't help a smile, but kept my voice sober. “Oh yeah? All some tacky story in the local paper will do is throw down a challenge to all the punky kids in the area. Remember that boy last year?”
He'd been fourteen or so, cocky, sneering. He'd walked into one of my introductory classes unexpectedly armed with a small pocket knife. I hadn't moved quite fast enough and I still had the scar, a pale three-inch line across my ribcage that didn't tan well in the summer.
“Oh,” Clare said, suddenly becoming serious. “Yes, I do. Sorry, Charlie, I wasn't thinking.” She was sounding subdued again.
“Don't worry about it. And don't dwell on this whole thing, either. It sounds heartless to say it, but people do stupid things every day and get away with it. Susie was just plain unlucky.”
How many times did I teach my students how to avoid making themselves easy targets? Don't walk home alone at night. Don't take short cuts. It seemed so obvious to me that I found myself unsympathetic towards anyone who didn't follow the simple rules. Some people seemed almost to have a death-wish.
Rape is one of those life-changing experiences that you never entirely recover from, you never really get over. You put it behind you, and you try to move on, but it will always be there, colouring your thoughts and actions. Like a big mental and emotional scar.
If it's touched you personally, you look at other people taking risks with a sense of anger, as though they're belittling your own experience. Like a cancer victim watching people casually smoking. If I could have done anything to avoid having been attacked, I would have done it.
“I don't care how stupid she was. Nobody deserves to die that way,” Clare said now, with a touch of belligerence. “What he did to her – it just makes me feel sick to my stomach.”
“They must have told you more than they told me, then,” I observed. “The police wouldn't do more than say it was a murder enquiry.”
“I talked to the girl on the crime desk at work,” Clare admitted. Although she was only in accounts, Clare's always seemed to be very pally with most of the editorial staff at the paper. “She knows all the gen, but they're not allowed to publish half of it. The police want to hold back as much as possible to try and trap the killer. They don't want a copy cat, either, which doesn't really bear thinking about.” I could almost hear her delicate shudder.
“Can you find out some more of the details for me?” I asked. I'd already had twenty questions from Ailsa. My pupils were bound to talk about the Susie Hollins murder, too. Bound to ask me if I really thought my theories could help them to avoid meeting a similar fate. Until I knew what had happened to Susie, I couldn't answer that. Students get very nervous at unanswered questions. She hesitated.
“Clare,” I said dryly, “I'm hardly likely to go to print in the rival freesheet with it, now am I?”
“OK, I'll ask,” she said, “but I can't guarantee she'll tell me more than she has already.”
She agreed to give me a call later on in the week and invited me round for a meal the following weekend. I rang off with a feeling of unease that I couldn't shift. And although Jacob makes curries that strip the enamel off your teeth, it had nothing to do with the prospect of his cooking, either.
***
The sense of foreboding still hadn't gone by the time Sam arrived. He turned up so exactly on the dot of eight-thirty that he must have been waiting outside the door, one finger hovering above the doorbell, eyes on his
