Part 20 (2/2)

'Fine. Good. Just calling to remind you, I'll be late back. A meeting with one of my accounts. Could be ten, even later. Don't wait up.'

'Mark?'

'Yes?'

Down the wires the silence pulsed. All of it carried from one place to another at the speed of electricity.

'You sure you're all right?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Okay. Call Wigwam or somebody. Have company.'

Always the a.s.sumption that Wigwam was at her beck. It irritated her that he was probably right.

It would be forever before they'd speak again. She hung up not knowing this; dialled the police while she was at it. Ruskin was in.

'You want to what?'

'It wasn't true.'

'What makes you think I give a ' There was a strangled arrest; the crash of a receiver being dropped, or maybe slammed. Then: 'Are you still there?'

'Yes.'

'Are you aware what a retraction will mean, Mrs Trafford? Have you taken legal advice on this?'

'Why is it I need advice now when before you were quite happy to '

'Apart from the other implications. Wasting police time, that's still an offence.' They should lock up the whole b.l.o.o.d.y world, his tone implied. 'Making false statements.'

'It's because I don't want to '

'Not to mention the matter of the other charges that might still, might still, be levied against you. You're into serious waters here, Mrs Trafford. You want to think very carefully before going any deeper.'

It had been on the news, she dimly recalled. The man who sold E to Lizbeth Betts. Pusher cheats justice. No wonder Ruskin was coming on like a shark.

'Are you listening, Mrs Trafford? Can I make myself plainer?'

'No, you listen to me. The statement I made, I made under duress. Duress. I'll be at the station to make a fresh one tomorrow. Failing that, I'll be calling a press conference. Your call, Inspector.'

Two could crash a phone.

For minutes afterwards she trembled on her feet; unable to move, unable to do anything. Except wonder, naturally, what precisely she had just done; and how, precisely, she would suffer the consequence.

She did not call Wigwam. Mark did that for her: she arrived a little after six thirty with a half-hearted attempt at just dropping in, which did not survive Sarah's opening sally.

'He said you sounded fraught. I think that was the word.'

'He's turning into my keeper!'

'We've all been worried, Sarah,' Wigwam said, without a hint of reproach.

It was the nearest she had come to making reference to Sarah's troubles.

'I have been,' Sarah admitted now. 'Fraught,' she said.

'I'll put the kettle on,' Wigwam said. 'And you can tell me all about it.'

But Sarah couldn't. It was not that she didn't want to; more that she wouldn't know where to start. And felt, too, something of what it would be like to listen to a friend, however close, tell you they were at the centre of a giant conspiracy in which men with beards lurked, wis.h.i.+ng them harm. You would have to love them very much not to feel enormous pity.

She countered a yawn. This terrible lethargy; it needed fighting. Needed shock.

Wigwam sensed Sarah backing away, but did not press her. Instead, she returned to Mark. 'He called me from his office,' she said, investing the location with an awesome significance: she really was impressed, the love. The nearest Wigwam had been to working in an office was dusting somebody else's desk. 'You could hear all sorts in the background.'

'They were probably playing cricket,' Sarah said.

'It was his office.'

'They do that,' Sarah said. 'Bins as wickets. Paper for b.a.l.l.s. You hit the fax machine, it's six and out.'

'He sounded ever so busy.'

'Maybe it was his turn to bowl.' She was tired of this already. 'Wigwam. He spends all day sitting in front of a green screen, making phone calls about money to other people in other banks. All of them sitting in front of the same green screen. Every day, you make more human contact than he does in a month.'

'Oh, I like my jobs. But they're not important.'

'Neither's his. It doesn't add or subtract a single sou to the sum of human happiness.'

'Would you rather he'd been a teacher?' Wigwam asked, a little wistfully. Wigwam had wanted to be a teacher.

'I'd rather he was happy,' Sarah said. And filled in all the blanks in her head: if he'd finished his doctorate, got the right fellows.h.i.+p, got stuck into his book . . .

Not married me, she thought with sudden clarity. To remind him of his promise.

And there was a thump on the doormat, as something dropped through the letterbox.

'Bit late for the postman,' Wigwam said. 'Do you want to me to get it?'

'It'll be one of the free newspapers,' Sarah said. Though it wasn't, in fact, it was a letter; addressed to her in a hand she didn't recognize, and amended by several others, since the original writer had transposed the house number. Try 217 had been added, along with Try 271. Postmarked two weeks earlier. Looking at it, holding it in her hand, Sarah felt her heart unaccountably sinking; as if she too had spent the last two weeks misaddressed, and was now back where she ought to be, which was not a good place at all.

'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine,' she lied absently.

'Aren't you going to open it?'

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