If she hadn’t been so clearly upset the response might have been ribald. Miriam looked quickly at Tariq, in her judgement the man most likely to light the blue touch-paper; but Tariq was watching with an absorbed expression and whatever he was thinking of it wasn’t a witticism.
Tessa was nearest. ‘What’s happened?’
‘My things!’ Sheelagh sounded close to tears: tears of rage, the sort that come with knuckledusters. ‘Someone’s been messing with my things. One of these bastards!’ Her eyes flayed the five men by turns.
‘Is anything missing?’
The thick black hair danced as Sheelagh shook her head. ‘No. But I know how I left them and they’ve been moved. And it’s not the first time.’ She told of the nightdress she put under her pillow not once but twice. ‘Jesus, I knew there were going to be some weirdos here, but I didn’t expect them to be sick!’
Tariq circled the company with his gaze, his face passive. ‘I wasn’t going to mention this, but my belongings have been disturbed too. I doubt anyone was interested in my underwear but my briefcase was opened. God knows why, there’s nothing of interest in it except to me and a few clients. Nothing valuable, nothing sensitive – must have been quite a disappointment. If somebody wants to say what they were looking for I’ll be happy to help.’
The silence could have been cut with something much blunter than a knife. Richard felt a change in the air like a pressure wave crossing the room as people who had come here tense and had then begun to relax, to enjoy one another’s company and start getting something out of the experience, were suddenly reminded how far from home, mentally and emotionally, they had strayed. They snapped back into themselves like overstretched elastic, suddenly wary of opening their hearts and souls to strangers whose motives they could not know and whose reliability they had no way of judging. Whoever rifled Sheelagh’s clothes and Tariq’s papers left them all feeling tampered with.
‘All right,’ said Miriam with ominous calm, ‘who’s playing silly buggers? Poking through each other’s personal property is an intrusion.’ The silence persisting, she looked at Tariq again. ‘When did you notice your briefcase had been opened?’
‘Five minutes ago. I went for a pen.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t say anything because I thought it was you.’
‘Me?’ The psychologist’s eyebrows disappeared into her pudding-basin fringe.
‘That’s how fortune-tellers do it: they have someone palm your wallet, then impress the hell out of you by knowing your bank account’s overdrawn and your mum’s on holiday in Bognor.’
Miriam didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Is that what you think? That what I do is some kind of conjuring trick?’
‘Excuse me,’ Sheelagh interrupted acidly, ‘but can we stick to the point? Somebody’s way out of line, and I want to know who and I want it stopped.’
‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Miriam contritely. ‘For the record, it wasn’t me. There’s nothing I can learn from your underwear or his papers that’s half as useful as talking to you. That means, I’m afraid, that it was one of you.’
It was interesting, she thought then, to see where each of them instinctively looked: Richard at Will, Will at Larry, Joe at her Tariq and Sheelagh at one another. Tessa was carefully looking nowhere, back in her safe neutrality.
Richard voiced what most of them were thinking. ‘Why? We’re strangers – what motive could we have to spy on each other?’
Miriam cleared her throat. ‘Let’s be charitable and suppose it was a joke. But it wasn’t funny, and if it happens again there’ll be trouble. Everyone here is out on an emotional limb. It takes courage to do this: to parade your problems in front of strangers. It’s difficult, it’s embarrassing, but it’s worth it for the support you can give one another. If somebody’s going to undermine that they’d better hope I never find out who.’
She had another exercise for them. ‘Who was your best friend at school?’
‘A fat boy called Charles,’ remembered Will. ‘He was no good at games either.’
‘My best friend was called Cathy,’ said Sheelagh. ‘We were both terrific at games.’
‘Tracy Louise Walters,’ drawled Tariq, his eyes misty with nostalgia. ‘We played games as well.’
‘My best friend at school was called Smelly.’ With a grin Richard explained. ‘The caretaker’s Jack Russell – we used to go ratting in the air-raid shelters during break. And quite often during maths.’
‘Tessa?’
‘I was a dreadful swot at school; she confessed with a peridot twinkle in her eye. ‘I decided early on what I wanted to be. After that I was always working towards it. My best friend was another embryo doctor, Lynn – something. We studied Latin together, God forgive us.’
‘Larry?’
The tennis pro looked at Miriam as if she’d called him out when he couldn’t see the Vinesman for chalk-dust. ‘I’m forty-one years old,’ he said distinctly. ‘I don’t remember the name of anyone I was at school with.’
‘I’m fifty-six,’ said Joe, ‘and I can remember the name of everybody in my class. And where they sat.’
‘Well, bully for you.’
‘And whose mum did them a proper lunch, and who just got bread and dripping.’ Joe smirked. ‘My best friend was Duncan Wilder. His mum baked Eccles cakes.’
‘All right,’ said Larry in mounting impatience. ‘My best friend was the captain of the girls’hockey team. Charity Matchett. She scored the winning goal for England in the 1973 world championships. She went on to become a concert violinist and Labour MP for Bootle.’
There was a longish pause while people wondered if it was safe to laugh. Then Miriam said levelly. ‘That isn’t actually true, though, is it?’
‘Not actually, no.’
‘You don’t see the point of this, do you?’
‘Not even slightly.’
‘Does anyone?’ Looking round them expectantly she met only averted gazes and the odd embarrassed cough. She sighed. ‘People are partly born and partly made. Some of our strengths and weaknesses are inherent, there from the moment of conception. Others are acquired in the course of our development. It’s useful to know which of our problems are programmed into our genes and which we’ve created for ourselves. By looking back to childhood we can see ourselves in something close to our native state, without the emotional baggage we’ve picked up since.’
There was a bemused pause. Then Will murmured, ‘She means, Were we born weird, did we achieve weirdness, or was weirdness thrust upon us?’
Miriam chuckled deep in her throat. ‘I like that. I may use it in my advertising. All right, we know about Smelly. Sheelagh, tell us about Cathy.’
Momentarily Sheelagh hesitated; then she began. ‘We were eleven. We met on the junior athletics squad. She beat me over a hundred metres, I beat her over five hundred. She was stronger, I had more stamina. For three years we carved up sports day between us.
‘What she was really good at, though, was tennis. By the time she was thirteen it was obvious she was wasted on school matches. There was a place in Richmond that gave tennis tuition as part of the syllabus. When her family were sure it was what she wanted they sent her there.
‘We kept in touch but we had less and less to talk about. Selina’s mum was right: the price Cathy paid for her first professional points was everything else. All she knew about, all she was interested in, was tennis. But it paid off – she got to Wimbledon. Twice she was the last Brit in the women’s singles.’
‘Do you still see her?’
‘I didn’t see her for years. Then about eighteen months ago she turned up out of the blue, dropped into my office for a gossip. It was lousy timing. I’d have loved to catch up on her news but I was expecting a client. We swapped phone numbers, promised to get together, but somehow it didn’t happen. I was busy. I expect she was too.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then it was too late. I picked up the paper one day and she was dead, killed in an accident. She only twenty-six.’
Something odd was happening. The silence was no longer a polite absence of chatter while she spoke. It had become an entity in itself, huge and oppressive, squatting in their midst like a great toad, using up the air. Waiting for it to end was like waiting for a volcano to erupt.
Miriam scanned their expressions, reading shock and pain in equal proportions. Sheelagh merely looked puzzled at the electric silence she had provoked. Larry, his jaw clenched like a clam, showed no emotion at all.
Will’s voice was as bloodless as his cheek. ‘A road accident. She died in a road accident.’
Richard shook his head. ‘A car accident. She drove into the Thames.’
Startled as if the ground had moved under her, Sheelagh looked from one to the other. ‘You knew her? Cathy?’ Her eyes hardened, sank claws into Richard’s face. ‘The woman who drowned was Cathy Beacham?’
Richard nodded a numb assent.
Her eyes scored him, moved on to Will. ‘You knew her too?’
‘I loved her.’ Cracks appeared in his voice. ‘She drove into the river? – I never knew that. I was – out of the country when it happened.’ The fractional pause where none was called for hit Richard like a blow. With a certainty born of years listening for such clues he thought, He’s lying! Why on earth is he lying? What the hell is going on here?
‘When I got back—’ For some moments Will couldn’t continue but no one jumped into the hiatus. They waited for him to regain control. ‘My secretary told me. She said Cathy died in her car. I assumed it was a crash. But it was suicide?’ His voice climbed.
Richard nodded soberly. ‘That was the finding at the inquest.’
Sheelagh was on her feet in the circle, her short fuse burning dangerously close to detonation. Her eyes found Miriam. ‘You don’t expect us to believe this is a coincidence? Two total strangers sharing an acquaintance I could just about swallow, but three?’
‘Four,’ Tariq said emptily. ‘I knew Cathy too. I represented her for a time.’ He reached inside his jacket, drew out the letter with his picture photocopied on to it. ‘That’s her, that I had my arm around. We were celebrating her first sponsorship.’
They looked. It could have been anyone, just the shoulder and sleeve of a white dress. It wasn’t possible to tell the age of the occupant, or even that she was black.
As if they were playing poker, Will matched Tariq’s picture with his own. ‘She was in that one too. It was taken in Paris, the weekend we got engaged. She gave the camera to some children and they took it. She was on this side’ – he tapped with his fingertip at the uneven border – ‘with the Eiffel Tower behind her.’
Richard’s letter made it three. ‘I don’t wear a suit that often so I’m pretty sure where it was taken. At the inquest.’
‘And mine was taken at Beckenham when I went to cheer her on one summer,’ said Sheelagh. ‘Cathy took it. So who else? Larry? Joe? Tessa?’ None of them offered a contribution. Sheelagh’s voice became viperous. ‘Well, Larry, the one thing we know about you is that you’re a tennis bum. It would be pretty odd if you didn’t know her.’
He wouldn’t answer. Will answered for him. ‘He knew her.’ The hatred that had startled Richard returned to thicken his voice. ‘He coached her. But only while it paid him. He used her, and he broke her, and when she was past mending he threw away the pieces. Not as if she was a person: as if she was a thing. A tool, something he used till it was done and he needed a new one.’ The words were running up out of control but he hardly seemed aware of it.
Larry’s eyes were glacial and his voice growled like bergs in an icefield. ‘Sonny, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But Will was too angry to back down this time. ‘I wondered if it was you. I wasn’t sure, we never met. But when you talked about the trouble at your club I was certain. It takes a special kind of bastard to turn talent into a bludgeon to beat someone with, but if that’s how you behave it’s how you’re going to go on behaving. The tragedy is that Cathy’s mum didn’t take you apart when you took an interest in her. What did you call Cathy? I know what she called you – the Iron Maiden.’ In his passion he poured such scorn into the words that what might have been mere satire came over as a deadly insult. The tennis-player reacted with speed and ferocity: he slapped the younger man’s face.
That right hand was still capable of hundred-mile-an-hour serves and Will reeled under the impact. But this was a confrontation he’d had many times in his mind, that he’d dreamed of, and probably nothing Larry could have done that left him standing would have stopped him. He straightened, his cheek flaming, an unimpressive figure cloaked in shining rage. His eyes raked the room for Tariq. ‘And if he was one of Cathy’s sharks, that makes you the other.’
Tariq’s lips moved as if to reply – not to deny it, perhaps to attempt an explanation. Then his gaze slid sideways to the psychologist, observing with quiet intensity and making no effort to intervene. ‘All right, Miriam,’ he said softly. ‘We can see what you’ve done. Do you want to tell us why?’
Miriam responded obliquely. ‘What makes you think this is my doing? I didn’t invite you on this course – you applied.’
‘Or someone sent us,’ said Richard. ‘I thought Will was being paranoid but he was right. Almost nobody’s here by choice. Joe says he is, and maybe Tariq is though the idea was sold to him. The rest of us are here because someone else fixed it. Did anyone get a choice of dates?’ A few heads shook uncertainly. ‘And these photographs – where did they come from?’
Miriam bore their hostility unflinchingly. ‘What can I tell you? There were seven applications. I accepted them all. I asked for a photo of each of you and they came with your cheques. It may be you were referred by third parties – many of my clients are. That’s where the pictures came from – Richard’s station, Sheelagh’s client, the organizers of Will’s competition and so on. If you want to know where they got them you’ll have to ask them.’
The silence returned, stretching and crawling. There was no doubt they’d stumbled on to something meaningful but the meaning eluded them. The silence was made up of a million tiny biochemical noises as synapses fired and misfired and the cogs of mind and memory turned and meshed and slipped and turned again.
Larry shook his sculpted head once, deliberately. Everything he did was deliberate, either to conserve energy or to exploit it. He wore an aura of dynamic stillness as if the potential for explosive action was implicit in every breath he took. ‘No, we don’t. I don’t have to do anything. All I have to do is leave. I’ll bid you all goodbye now. It’s been interesting, but I don’t imagine we’ll meet again.’ He carried every eye with him as he left the room, and some admired his courage in walking out and some despised his cowardice for the same reason. But no one made a move to follow him.
None of them had many belongings here. It took only moments for Larry to throw his into his grip. Then he went to the lift and punched the button. There was no distant whirring of gears so he punched again.
Mrs Venables appeared at his elbow. ‘I’ll get the builders to reconnect it.’ Breathing heavily, Larry dumped his grip on the floor to wait. After a moment he leaned against the shut doors.
Those in the conference room were still puzzling over the turn of events when a cry of alarm so desperate it seemed barely human froze both souls and limbs.
Richard, who’d heard more screams than most people, recovered first or at least moved fastest. But by the time he reached the corridor there was no one in sight.