Gatwick was not as nice as Heathrow. It had a jerry-built look, and it was crowded with tired-looking travelers, speaking a dozen different languages, who looked as if they’d flown all night on economy flights where the toilets had reached capacity several hours before the plane reached Gatwick.
Ann felt safe amidst the rabble. It was not a place she could imagine Neville choosing to be. So here she was, in jeans, three thousand miles from home, with a single bag. She longed for the moment when the plane doors shut and she could be sure that she had escaped Neville.
She hadn’t escaped Bobby Fitzgerald, who clearly viewed their shared travel plans as an opportunity. He arranged adjoining seats and stuck to her like glue until they boarded.
It was the first time in years Ann hadn’t flown first class. But she couldn’t remember a time when she’d been more comfortable. She and Fitzgerald had an entire center row on the 747 to themselves, and sitting in the center of the center row, they sprawled across the unoccupied seats to either side of them. She began to enjoy their conversation and to be grateful for the distraction his presence offered on the long flight.
They had been airborne for less than an hour when Fitzgerald,
looking at her closely, said, “What happened to your face?”
Ann’s hand went to her face reflexively. “An accident. Sort of.”
He continued to look at her. “Mind telling me what you were doing with Neville Cook to begin with? I mean, sure, he was rich and good-looking—but for a woman of your character, those must have been trivial considerations … .”
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her eyes felt raw under her eyelids. “You say that as if it were a joke. But I didn’t care—except, I guess, that I thought I needed the protection Neville’s money gave me.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
Ann adjusted the flimsy navy blue airplane blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders, and drew her stocking feet up under her on the seat.
“When I first met Neville, I didn’t dream it would be a long-term relationship. He was interesting, I wasn’t seeing anyone else, and it didn’t take any particular effort on my part to see him. But after—I don’t know, maybe a couple months—he started to bother me. He was very controlling with me, with the other people around him. It didn’t take me long to decide ‘enough already, who needs it’—and I more or less stopped seeing him, for a time.”
Ann stopped. To Bobby it seemed that there was something she was considering saying. But when she spoke again, all she said was, “The thing is, something pretty awful happened, and I—well, I guess you could say I collapsed. Neville’s good with collapsed. He just took over. Neville made me feel safe, and the trade-off—that I didn’t even know had happened until it was too late—was that I became a sort of zombie.”
“So what changed?”
“Different things. Some big, some almost trivial. The trivial things were maybe more important than the big things.”
“Like what?”
Ann grinned. “For one thing, going to battle with Jocelyn Cook. It kind of shook me out of my stupor. I couldn’t believe the way she treated me, but when I stopped to think about it, I realized that in most respects, Neville treated me even worse. And I’d put up with it. Once I stood up to Jocelyn, not tolerating Neville’s behavior was a logical next step.”
Bobby gave a low laugh. “She really is a piece of work, isn’t she? And when you put her in the same room as Neville, you’ve got a lethal combination. So you broke up with him. I gather Neville didn’t take the news that you were leaving gracefully?” His eyes were on her discolored, swollen face.
Ann touched her face again. She could feel hot skin. “I’ll tell you something funny. It was the only time Neville showed any real emotion in all the time I’ve known him. If you’d asked me before this morning if I thought Neville could be violent, I would have told you it was the one thing I was sure he couldn’t be. I didn’t think there was anything in him that could produce out-of-control anger, much less physical violence. The real joke is that Neville was the only person in the world who made me feel safe … .” She shook her head at her own misplaced trust.
“Tell me what it was that scared you to begin with.”
Ann took a deep breath. She looked at him, uncertain. “My sister, Holly, was murdered. In my apartment. I found her, and it just … it just destroyed me. I couldn’t go back to the apartment. Everywhere I went I felt this terror that the person who did it was near me … .”
Bobby’s face was frozen in an expression of horror or repulsion. Ann couldn’t tell which. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Bobby held up a hand. He sat forward, and said, “It’s not what you think. It’s just that it is the most extraordinary thing—”
She said, “It is extraordinary, and not just because this horrible thing has happened. It makes freaks out of the family members. How many people do you know who’ve had a sister murdered?”
Bobby said, “Only you and me.”
Ann was too stunned by Bobby telling her that his own sister had been murdered to hear much of what he said about the murder. And she was too absorbed in the horror of the coincidence to pay attention to what Bobby was saying. She stopped him. “I’m sorry, I haven’t been paying any attention to what you said. Start again. I’d really like to know what happened.”
“I was just saying,” Bobby explained, “we still don’t know what happened. My sister was a terrific kid. The only thing the cops could figure was that she went out with somebody she didn’t know—we found out she was a bit of a risk taker along those lines—and that the guy was a creep. By the time she figured that out, it was too late.”
Ann nodded. “It was the same thing with my sister—that she’d used bad judgment in letting someone into the apartment. He tried to rape her—she was partially undressed, but there wasn’t any physical evidence that she’d actually been raped—and she’d been drinking. Which was kind of strange. It wasn’t that Holly never drank, but she was such a scatterbrain, she’d never drink long enough to get drunk. She’d open a can of beer, take a sip, put the can down, and go into another room. An hour later, she’d come back out and take another can of beer out of the refrigerator. She was the kind of person who’d take a drink at a party, put her glass down,
and not remember where she left it. Getting seriously drunk would have taken organizational skills and a level of concentration way, way beyond Holly’s abilities.
“But what was strange was that when the medical examiner did the autopsy, the report showed a blood alcohol of point three-oh—and a lot of gin in her stomach, as if she’d been chugalugging. It just wasn’t like her at all.”
Bobby’s face had a strange expression. “How did you say she was killed?”
“They never found a weapon. The guy used a long, sharp instrument—which was all the police told me. They said it wasn’t an impulse murder, that the wound was inflicted in a ‘purposeful manner.’ Their words, exactly. The weapon tore the hell out of her aorta. She probably bled to death in minutes, but there was hardly any blood because the wound closed on itself after she was stabbed.”
Bobby looked dazed. Ann guessed she’d been too graphic.
“I’m sorry. I’m telling you more than you want to know. The thing that you don’t know about murders until they happen to someone you love is that there’s more than one victim. That the family is never the same again. These guys who go around killing people, they do a lot more damage than just the murder.”
Bobby spoke softly. “You’ve got the pronoun wrong.”
“I’ve got the pronoun wrong? What—?”
“It’s not they. It’s not third person plural. It’s he. It’s third person singular.”