Bright Air - Barry Maitland [109]
Lauren sat rigid, unblinking, trying to absorb the possibility that her husband was a murderer.
Finally she said heavily, ‘It’s so … bizarre, I suppose it must be true. And why haven’t you told the police?’
I explained to her. ‘I thought enough people had suffered over this.’
‘Then I should thank you. I know Suzi would be devastated … Damien’s parents. So will you stick to your other version?’
‘From the way you reacted it doesn’t sound as if we’ll get away with it.’
‘Not necessarily. I spent the whole night at the hospital and only spoke a few words to the police. They’ll want to hear my side of things. If I support your story, and tell them that Damien has been very depressed since Curtis and Owen’s accident, they’ll have to believe it. And that’s not necessarily untrue—he has been different since that funeral, since he saw you again. I know he visited Marcus several times, and each time came back very low and started drinking heavily. Perhaps he guessed then that it was all going to come out, what they had done to that poor girl. I can still hardly believe it, that Damien would deliberately—’
‘It was Marcus, Lauren. He could do that to people.’ And then, because I’d told her everything else, I added, ‘She was pregnant, apparently.’
I regretted it as soon as the words were out, and I had to turn away as tears flooded into my eyes. It was an excruciating moment.
She waited until I’d pulled myself together, then murmured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and left.
It was hard to concentrate on anything during the following days, waiting for Maddox to return. Once, when I was a very small boy, I had dawdled on my way to school one morning and arrived late. I joined a line of miscreants outside the headmistress’s room. The door opened and we were invited in, one by one, to explain ourselves. As I waited my turn in the doorway I heard the boy in front of me offer his excuse: ‘Please, Miss, my mum woke up late.’ This seemed to satisfy the interrogator, who wrote something in a book and called me forward. I said, ‘Please, Miss, my mum woke up late.’ She wrote it down with a grim smile and I wet myself. It was my first real taste of the awful might of Authority, and now, as the days passed, Maddox took on that mantle, and I awaited his reappearance with dread, certain that he would see through our story with the same perspicacity.
As a distraction I persuaded Mary to let me take her to a matinee of HMS Pinafore at the Opera House. Mary loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and the weather was fine, so I suggested we walk there, around the bay at Woolloomooloo and up through the Botanic Gardens to Circular Quay. The show was a great success; we sailed the ocean blue, sighed with Little Buttercup at her unrequited love and thrilled to the plot reversal in the final act. The only unexpected thing was the shock I felt when I realised that the name of the captain of the Pinafore was Corcoran. Had I known that? Was that why I’d wanted to go?
Afterwards we had a glass of champagne on the harbour’s edge. I was disconcerted to spot Damien and Lauren’s balcony up there between the towers, and didn’t catch what Mary was saying at first. It seemed she had been to see her doctor about some symptoms, and he had sent her for tests, which had established angina, so she felt she should catch a taxi rather than walk home. I felt terrible at having made her walk all that way, but she dismissed my apology, saying she was fine really, just a little tired.
It was the middle of the following week before Maddox invited me over to the police station at Darlinghurst for another chat. I expected apocalyptic wrath, and thought it must be some kind of devious police trick when he seemed mildly satisfied. Finally I came to understand that Lauren had worked her magic on him, and he even expressed some concern that Anna and I may have been traumatised by that last encounter with Damien, whom they now knew had been deeply disturbed for some time.
There were a couple of angles that