Huge tears welled up in Joanna’s eyes and poured down her cheeks but she said nothing as she gazed into Angela’s face.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Angela. Joanna nodded silently. The tears rolled unabated. Angela telephoned the instruction to Gary and looked at Joanna with what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
“I’ve been absolutely frantic.”
“I’m sure you must have. Most people, as far as I’m aware, have been thinking you’re anxious about your form and the… the situation with Stewart.”
Joanna managed a grim smile through her tears. “I’ve let people think that; it’s been convenient. Actually, I got over Stewart very quickly. I was devastated at first but about a week after I knew he’d had his first date with Candy I realized I felt relieved. Does that sound strange?”
“Not at all,” responded Angela. She thought back briefly to a time in her late teens when a boyfriend had dumped her. Instead of the sorrow she might have imagined, she had felt only as though a burden had fallen from her shoulders.
“Mmm… I mean, I loved Stewart, or thought I did, at least, but it took me a long time to realize that I could never quite relax with him. I always felt I had to look good, dress to impress and stuff like that, and kind of behave in a particular way. It’s his parents as much as him. You can’t slob out with the Bickerstaffs.”
Angela thought back over her meeting with Stewart’s parents and knew exactly what Joanna meant. “I can understand that,” she said. “I’m assuming, though…” Her voice tailed off and she dipped her head in the general direction of Joanna’s abdomen.
“Oh yes, it’s Stewart’s baby.” Joanna’s tears were drying up now.
“Does he know?”
“Oh yes. To be fair to him, he said he’d do the necessary.”
“What does he consider ‘the necessary’ to be?”
“I think he means he’ll pay for an abortion. When I spoke to him he just said that when I’ve sorted out the operation to let him know and he’ll do the necessary.” Joanna shuddered and tears started up in her eyes again. “I’ve been beside myself,” she said again, “wondering what to do, how to handle it. And it’s really odd to have this tremendous sense of well-being at the same time – physically, I mean.”
There was a brief pause as the door opened and Gary came in with a cup of tea, and the coffee that Angela had ordered earlier. He glanced at the two women, realised that his presence wasn’t required and left the room. Angela was impressed with his sensitivity.
Once the door had closed behind him, Joanna spoke again. “How did you know?”
“Well, when you’re conducting an investigation you get pretty well attuned to when people have things on their mind and when they’re not telling you everything. It was obvious that you’ve been preoccupied and though, believe me, I’ve got nothing but sympathy for your predicament, my concern has got to be whether or not what’s troubling you is related to the investigation.” Angela smiled. “In your case, a couple of things came together. When I saw you on the practice courts the other day you overran and nearly bashed into the net post. If you’d gone into it you would have been hit right in the abdomen. There was a look of sheer terror on your face just before you managed to avoid the post.”
Joanna opened her eyes wide at the memory. “Yes, that was a scary moment.”
“And then I remembered that knitting wool we found in your locker when we did the searches, and couldn’t help wondering.”
A dreamy look came into Joanna’s eyes. “Yeah, I haven’t knitted in years but I started a little coat after I had my scan. I could hardly believe it when they first gave the picture to me. I was just blown away. I was, like, that’s my baby… my baby. I’ve got a whole other person inside me. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I keep it with me all the time.”
There was a pause.
“I don’t want to have an abortion.”
“I’m sure you don’t. I don’t blame you.”
Joanna’s eyes widened in surprise. “You don’t?” she asked.
Angela looked at her, thinking again of the knitting wool. This was a woman who wanted to give life to her child. She decided on the direct approach.
“Why should you have an abortion?” she replied.
Joanna’s look of puzzlement would have been comical if the matter hadn’t been so grave.
“Well, there’s my career. I’m a sportswoman. People will expect… Stewart seemed to think it automatic that I get rid… My parents have invested so much in me, to help me get into tennis.” The tears were starting in her eyes again.
“I’m sure your parents have been glad to help, Joanna. That’s normal; most parents would do all they could. But I don’t for one moment suppose that they would want you to get rid of your child. In any case, being pregnant is obviously helping your game.”
Angela watched Joanna considering the implications of this for a moment.
“They’ll think I’m throwing my whole career away.”
“Why so? How far gone are you?”
“Twelve weeks.”
Angela looked at her. She was already twelve weeks pregnant so she’d probably had the first inklings of her condition about two months ago or more and she’d done nothing about getting an abortion. She had, however, done something about getting antenatal care, and had had a scan. Angela strongly suspected that her plan had been to go on saying nothing until her bulging belly had begun to cause comment, by which time she would present her pregnancy to all concerned as a done deal.
This woman wanted her baby.
“So, the baby’s due in… January?” asked Angela. Joanna nodded. “OK, so you’ll have to miss the American and the Australian Opens and whatever other tournaments you would otherwise enter, but after January there’s a whole five months to get back into training for next year’s Wimbledon. Really, when you come to think of it, tennis players can spend that amount of time out of the game just because of injury anyway.”
“Oh my goodness, I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Joanna laughed, the first time Angela had seen her do so, and her face was transformed. Then her expression became serious again and she was silent for a few moments. “Actually,” she said, “I think my mum’s guessed already.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised; mums are like that,” replied Angela.
A silence descended in the room, during which it became obvious to Angela that the woman sitting opposite her was entirely different from the scared girl who had walked in.
“I’m going to go and tell her,” said Joanna, after a few moments. “I can do it now. I’m not frightened any more.” She turned a radiant smile upon Angela. “Thank you so much, Inspector. I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped me. I’m only sorry that I can’t help you with the investigation. What was bothering me had nothing to do with it, obviously.”
Angela waved away her regrets. “It’s a question of elimination. It all helps in the long run,” she assured her as she watched her depart. This situation was turning Joanna into a strong, confident young woman. Angela thought it quite possible that she would advance through a few more rounds in this tournament and she had no doubt that she would come back next year determined to do even better.
“So that’s sorted, then,” she said aloud to herself. She yawned and stretched, suddenly very tired. Winding things up for the day looked like a very attractive option. She called all the team and they set about gathering their things together. Jim and Rick began to debate which pub they could reach most easily and Leanne freshened up her lipstick. Gary was having a good-natured argument with Derek about football when Angela’s mobile rang.
“Hello, Inspector Costello speaking.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
“It’s Tara.”
“Tara?” Angela racked her brains.
“Tara Simpkins, from Bel-Mor Sports Agency.”
Light dawned. “Oh, right – Tara! I remember.”
Across the room she saw Gary register the name, and from his expression and gestures it was clear that his memory featured the amount of cleavage and leg on display in Danny Moore’s office. He turned to his male colleagues, saying, “Hey, you should have seen this girl…”
Thankful that he had the good sense to keep his voice very low, Angela grinned and turned away. “How may I help you, Tara?” she asked.
“I’ve got some information, to do with the case. Well, I reckon it’s to do with the case; you know, about Petar Belic.”
“Yes.” Angela turned back towards Gary and raised her eyebrows in his direction. “Where can we meet you?”
“Er, dunno,” she said finally. There was a pause. Clearly Tara had expected to be asked to come to a police station.
“Where do you live, Tara?”
“Balham.”
“That’s not too far from Wimbledon. Shall we come to you?”
“All right,” she said, and gave her address. Angela wrote it down, finished the call and turned to Gary. “We’ve not quite finished for the day after all, Gaz.”
“Are we going to see the luscious –?”
“Yes we are,” she smiled, “and I expect you to keep custody of the eyes, as the nuns used to teach me at school.”
“Yeah, right,” grinned Gary, following her out through the door. Within moments they were settling themselves into Angela’s car and heading out through the gates of Wimbledon. “You’ve got to admit, that was quite a display she put on yesterday.”
“It certainly was,” agreed Angela. “I think she failed to reach her target audience, though.”
“Yeah, what was that all about? Oh, is that what you mean by ‘custody of the eyes’, the way Danny Moore made such a point of not looking at her… her…?”
“Charms?”
“Yeah, right, her charms.”
Angela laughed. “Exactly so. Let’s find out what she’s got to say.”
Tara Simpkins lived in a terraced house not far from the underground station. If Gary had been hoping for the same display of flesh as he’d had the previous day, he was disappointed. The smart working suit had been replaced by jeans, a loose T-shirt and trainers. Chewing gum, Tara showed them into a cosy sitting room. Family photographs adorned the walls, in which Angela and Gary could recognize younger versions of Tara with her parents and children too similar to be anything other than her brother and two little sisters.
“D’you want to sit down?” she asked.
They took a seat on a floral patterned sofa set into a bay window. Silence settled on the room. Tara looked nervous and slightly pale.
Angela smiled in encouragement. “There’s nothing to worry about, Tara. If the information doesn’t seem relevant to the case after all, we won’t talk about it to anyone.”
Tara nodded and gave a small smile of her own in return. “I could tell you a lot about that place,” she said suddenly, then lapsed back into silence.
Angela looked at Gary and raised her eyebrows. A bit of softening up seemed to be required.
“Is it a good place to work, Bel-Mor?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s quite nice.”
“Have you been there long?”
“Nearly three months.”
“And Mr Moore – he’s a good boss?”
This seemed to do the trick. “Goody two-shoes if you ask me, him!” snapped Tara with venom. She shot a look at Angela as if wondering how this would be taken.
Gary got busy with his pen and Angela nodded, carefully digesting what she had just heard. “In what way, Tara?” she asked.
Tara shrugged. “It started off all right. Danny was friendly and at first he’d stop by the reception and ask me how I was getting on, you know, with the job – and he sort of spent time chatting to me. So I took it that he was interested.”
“You thought he was giving you the come-on?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you fancy him?”
Tara looked blankly at Angela for a moment as if the question hadn’t crossed her mind. “Well, yeah. I mean, he’s the boss, isn’t he? He owns half the company. I thought I could be on to a good thing,” she said, frankly.
Angela managed not to raise her eyebrows.
“Anyway,” continued Tara, “he said I could take my problems to him if I needed to talk about anything. ‘We’re all one big happy family at Bel-Mor’ – that’s what he said.” Tara lifted her eyes to the older woman’s face. “It’s my first job as a receptionist, and I was lucky to get it.”
I’ll say, thought Angela.
“So, of course I thought: this is good. I could do all right here.” She looked at the pair of them and moved the gum round in her mouth. “I’ve really done my best, right? I’ve stayed late, ’cos that was when there was the best chance to talk to him alone. And I showed I was keen. I talked to him as much as I could. I’ve even invented a few problems to get him interested. See, my mate Lauren, she’s got the same sort of job as me and she’s really cracked it. Her boss buys her stuff, takes her out. She was taken to a champagne bar last week in a stretch limo and it didn’t cost her a thing.”
Angela hid a smile. Oh, I’m sure some sort of payment was extracted from your friend Lauren, she thought, but that’s part of the arrangement, as you very well know.
“Anyway,” continued Tara, “I really thought I was on to something last week. Lauren said to talk to him about the boys round here, say they’re not sophisticated and that I need a mature man. So I did that.”
There was a strangled kind of cough from Gary. Angela forced herself to keep her eyes fixed on Tara. “And what happened?”
“Cor, you should have seen him! Big eyes, mouth drops open. ‘Tara, you’re not seriously suggesting… I had no idea that this is what you meant! You’re young enough to be my daughter, sweetheart. I was just trying to be nice.’ I mean, was I humiliated or what?”
Tara’s eyes moistened with tears of frustration as she seemed to contemplate the champagne bars and stretch limousines that other women had, and Danny Moore could have if he wanted them, but she knew she would never attain, not if she saved for a lifetime.
Angela thought back to the display of the previous day. “You haven’t given up, though, have you?”
Tara wiped away a tear and threw Angela a calculating glance. “Well, I thought about what he said, and it occurred to me that if he thought of me like a daughter then he needs to see that I’m, you know, a woman with, like… needs.” Tara blew a huge bubble with the gum and expertly gathered it back into her mouth as it burst.
Angela couldn’t help feeling sorry for the girl. You’re chasing an illusion, Tara, she thought, and I’ve no doubt you’re courting heartbreak. “Made any progress?” she asked after a moment.
Tara shook her head reluctantly. “I can’t seem to catch his eye. I’m a bit worried now, as well, because they’ve extended my period of probation.”
“I see,” said Angela. I’m not surprised, she thought.
“Anyway,” continued Tara, “for the last week or so his wife’s been popping in around home time, so I’ve just had to leave the office without any chance to talk to him.”
Angela couldn’t be quite sure whether or not Tara had drawn the connection between her – no doubt very clumsy – attempt at seduction, the extended probation and Heather Moore “popping in”. Tara seemed to combine a mix of amazing naÏveté and animal cunning, and Angela was reminded a little of Lavinia Bannister. In any case, all this was getting her nowhere; she wanted to get home and had no doubt that a pint was waiting in a pub somewhere for Gary.
“Well, I’m sorry things are difficult for you at work at the moment, Tara.” Did I keep a straight face as I said that? “But I need to get to the information that you said you had for us.”
“Yeah.” Tara shifted animatedly in her seat, a not very pleasant smile playing around her mouth. A bombshell was about to be dropped. Unless Angela had guessed wrongly, Danny Moore was about to become very sorry that he’d resisted Tara’s blandishments.
“Would you like to tell me what it is?”
“Yes,” she said, in the manner of one pulling an ace from her sleeve. “Petar was about to pull the plug on the company. Danny was going to be ruined.”