"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

Rhoda clenched her hands under the table. Careful, Going too far. What sort of affection was shown on that mural upstairs? Precious little. Okay - so it was in the style of someone else - but it was ninety percent Lisa. And you've read most of the early diaries. It's no use trying to tell this boy that she loved him. She was as weird as hell. And he knows it. Try putting a little guilt on him: "You've read her book, of course?" He shook his head.
"Why not? You must be awfully proud of her?" He was silent. She applied salve. "Possibly you were too young to appreciate it when it was published. You're not now. Read it, Simon, it's terrific." It was an exaggeration. It was a good, well-researched book, cleverly illustrated. It would bore him, probably, but it wouldn't upset him. Lisa, at the time of writing it, had been totally sane.
But how sane had she been when Clare had walked into her life and into Peter's bed? And then gone missing?

When the son of an old friend lets a stranger into his home there's not much you can do about it, Maybridge pointed out to his wife. "Simon is old enough to do as he likes," Meg agreed. But age couldn't be measured in years and Simon's naivety worried her. Journalists don't move in on the bereaved within a couple of weeks of the funeral - actually move in and live in the house - with some weak story about researching background. No respectable newspaper or magazine would sanction it.
Or was she, in turn, being naive? How far would the Press go for a story? Too far, she had to concede, for a story that was hot and immediate. Which this wasn't. Rhoda Osborne was a freelance journalist, Simon had told her, who wanted to write about his mother. It was convenient for her to stay with him so that she could look through his mother's art work and manuscripts. In return she would cook him his meals. It wouldn't be for long. Meg had called to see how he was getting on and had been startled by what Simon, speaking defensively, had told her. Carefully keeping her voice neutral, she had asked if she might meet her. Sometime when she wasn't working, Simon had hedged. "She's up in my mother's studio, taking notes. I mustn't disturb her."
"My immediate response to that," Meg told Maybridge, "was to say, 'Mustn't you? In your own home, too. How odd!' And then he blushed and was so bothered about blushing that he wandered over to the window and stared out across the garden towards the orchard. 'She likes the almond tree,' he said. 'My mother liked it, too. Used to sit there a lot. 'How do you follow that? With Grimm's horror story?" Maybridge, whose knowledge of Grimm was slight, didn't know what she was talking about. He raised an enquiring eyebrow. "A particularly nasty tale about the decapitation of a child," Meg explained. "The lid of a chest full of apples is dropped on him when he looks inside - by his villain- ous stepmother. Had it been his natural mother it would have been worse. The body is buried under the almond tree. A bird squawks a lament every few pages. Lisa has a painting of the bird in her studio." "Oh," said Maybridge.
"Given Lisa's state of mind," Meg went on, "researching Grimm couldn't have done her much good. Doctor Donaldson should have fed her a diet of Enid Blyton. Safe, nice, twee, little Noddy."
Maybridge, adrift from the original subject, steered back to it. Simon might be bedding a girlfriend, he suggested, and had made up the story about the journalist. And it was handy the girl was cooking his meals. If he were being harassed, he would have said so. As for a stupid yarn about an almond tree and decapitation, what about all those blood and guts stories David had thrived on when he was a kid? They hadn't done him any harm.
"Debatable," Meg said drily. "He still reads Stephen King."
Maybridge, unwilling to be drawn into a discussion on the literary merit, or lack of it, of the horror genre -personally he liked King, too, and read him when Meg wasn't around - went out to do some gardening.
The mild spring had brought on the roses and some of the bushes needed de-budding. A necessary act of decapitation to help the survivors to bloom. Superintendent Claxby would draw an analogy there, he thought, as he snipped away with his secateurs, especially if Sergeant Radwell were around. A discussion about the overcrowding of prisons had prompted Radwell, normally tactful and reticent, to state with some heat.that anyone advocating the death penalty must be sick. "Murder is the ultimate atrocity," he'd dared tell Claxby, "especially when committed by the state." Claxby, unruffled, had drawn the sign of the cross over his head and murmured, "Pax vobiscum. Now hie thee to a monastery - or call me 'sir'." The 'sir had been whispered through gritted teeth and Claxby had smiled. "Pompous little prick," he'd said to Maybridge later. Maybridge, as always, had defended him. Mostly because he agreed with him. But how far could compassion be extended? He'd felt none for the Bible-quoting serial strangler that Bradshaw's evidence had nailed. A life sentence in Hixon's case should mean just that, and probably would.
Maybridge recalled Hixon's first murder - the strangling of a prostitute in the vault of one of Bristol's war-damaged churches, known locally to some of the winos who dossed down there as the Church of the Nazarene. The structure, beyond repair, had been left open to the sky, a grey elegance of upthrusting stones softened by ivy and clumps of sedum. The vault, in most places intact, had at one time been the repository of brasses let into the floor. These had been cleared away and the cavities filled with rubble. As a temporary shelter for tramps the vault was marginally better than sleeping under a bridge, though almost as cold. After the discovery of the body they gave it a miss for a while. Now most of them were back. A strangled prostitute called Louise, her hair plaited and tied around her neck like a noose, might still haunt the sensitive, but on a pouring wet night she was better forgotten. Old Alf Whitman had found her. "A stiff at St Naz," he'd told the desk officer at the nearest police station. The officer, who had never heard of St Naz, believed, rightly, that the old fellow was drunk. Whitman, not sufficiently drunk to stop trying and not sober enough to be lucid, had wept with exasperation, tinged with terror, before finally getting through. "And I didn't do it," he'd added. "Aw, Jeeze God - t'wasn't me."
Whitman had avoided being called as a witness at the trial by the simple expedient of dying, aged seventy-four, of a liver infection in Bristol Royal Infirmary. One of Hixon's relatives - well, probably one of Hixon's relatives - had sent a wreath. The only one. Bronze chrysanthemums. The typed message had been:

May the Lord receive you with joy.
C.H.

Maybridge smiled wryly at the recollection. Hixon mad? Well, maybe. But not mad enough to convince the psychiatrists, and not sane enough to be careful. When an insurance clerk who is also a lay preacher and an apparently happily married man embarks on a mission to rid the world of sleaze (his word), he shouldn't sample the product first. In his case, five products. All under thirty, most pretty, none deserving to die.
Doctor Donaldson, who was supposed to be an expert in matters of the mind, had attended the trial and heard Hixon's final outburst. "The fire of fanaticism," he'd observed, "stoked by lust.".It probably summed it up.

It had been no part of Rhoda's plan to sexually arouse Simon. The word 'lust' didn't occur to her - or to him. 'Sexually arouse' might be the same thing, but it sounded better. She had to accept the fact that he was sexually aroused and that the reaction was natural. She had been a fool not to anticipate it. He'd had an erection, after all, that night when he was pissed and she'd put him to bed. Now, quite sober, his masculinity was being an awful nuisance to him, and a blushing embarrassment because most of the time he couldn't hide it. Amused, she had thought of Kester-Evans. What would he have counselled? Cold showers? Physical exercise? Withdrawal from the scene of temptation?
She could hear Simon showering in the bathroom every morning - not a cold one, though. When she went in later for her bath, the window was steamed over and the towel rail blazing hot. As for exercise: he mooched. A stroll around the garden. A short walk to the dairy for milk. He didn't even go out in his car. Just looked at it as if he was rather pleased he had it - a handsome piece of machinery. And he looked at her. Differently. When the young fall in love there is a degree of pain. Rhoda, carefully avoiding the word 'love', felt her conscience kick. She tried to subdue it. A few words to Peter, inside her head, helped. "I haven't enticed Simon. Been careful not to. I saw to the domestic arrangements. They're okay. You couldn't fault them.
I sleep in Lisa's studio, on her couch, with her Welsh blanket on top of me. It smells of whatever perfume she used. Sweet. She wasn't sweet, was she? But that's the way she smelled. Simon wanted me to have the guest bedroom, next to his. I told him, no. I needed to work late. And I do. And I have. If you and Lisa were able to walk in on me, Peter, you'd erupt together in one great explosion of rage. I sometimes lie in her bed and think of a great hellish thundercloud of rage. And it excites me. Pleases me. Makes me more sure that what I'm doing must be done. Digging away for the truth, all the time.
"But Simon ... What do I do about Simon? I'm not here to hurt him."
Simon, aware of a cooling in a relationship that, on her part, had never been very warm, was mutely miserable. He had shared his home with this gut-churning, odd, beautiful, vixen-eyed woman for six days, and in that time he had pushed himself up to some sort of mountain peak, because she was up there, too. Mountain peaks are lonely places when the other person doesn't want you. You might get the message that she's rejecting you but you only get it in your brain. Your brain won't transmit it to the rest of you. Your body doesn't get it. Your body gives you hell. You can't even eat - well, you can't eat much.
He derived some comfort from the fact that she spent time cooking the evening meal for them both, doing the best she could with the contents of the deep-freeze and showing concern about his likes and dislikes. "If you don't like chicken chasseur, or whatever ridiculous name it's called, you should have said." "I do like it." "Eat it, then." "I have - most of it." "Not enough. You're a growing boy, for God's sake." "For God's sake, I'm bloody eighteen." A rueful smile from her: "Sorry. lt's just that I'm bothered about you. It's not all that long since the funeral and ..." she shrugged, "well, I think I know what you must be feeling. It takes time for everything to be normal again. I'll be gone soon - just a few more days - and then you'll have the place to yourself."
He looked at her, stricken. "A few more days?" The future was a horrid abyss, a dark crater on his mountain top. He couldn't bear it.
She collected up the plates and emptied the remains of his meal into the pedal-bin. "There's ice-cream and cherry tart."
He winced.
"What, then? What would you like?"
A tumblerful of neat whisky. An injection of any mind-numbing drug. "Nothing."
She felt extremely irritated but kept her voice level. "I may have to stay a while longer - perhaps another week." Now would the silly boy have some pudding?
He agreed he would - just a little.
Simon's apparent indifference to what she was doing up in his mother's studio, day after day, was a bonus she hadn't expected when she'd moved in. She'd hidden the diaries in a half-used box of typing paper and shoved it under the couch in case he walked in on her and picked one of them up. It didn't matter if he saw the manuscripts, they wouldn't hurt him, and she was working on them legitimately; a few pages of boring comment, turned out now and then in case he asked about progress. She'd asked him if he'd ever gone through his mother's papers - anything she might have written - or any letters - or even postcards that she might have received. "When someone dies, there's usually correspondence to be got rid of. If you haven't done that, could you let me have a quick glance? There might be something relevant to the profile I'm writing. Editors like the human touch." He said there weren't any letters. His mother never kept them. And his father didn't either. "What about art, then? Most of her sketches relate to her work. Did she never do sketches of her friends?" The possibility obviously surprised him. "No, she never painted living people." Her art, he explained, was other people's art - re-done. Though she might have some sketch books she'd put away somewhere. He didn't know. He'd never asked. Art and literature -if writing books about art was literature - weren't his 'thing'. Any more than forensic pathology was. "We don't necessarily like what our parents like," he'd added, his gaze lingering on her hair as if he longed to touch it.
Well, sometimes we do, she'd thought.
Why did most men like long hair?
Why had Lisa bought a wig?
The entry was irr Lisa's penultimate diary:

Bought a switch of hair in a little shop near the university. Light blonde. Divided it into two plaits. Dressed for dinner in the dark blue bust-clinging frock. Like hers. Well, almost. She's more busty than me. Let the two plaits swing forward and form a loop, then went down to Peter in the dining-room. He was decanting brandy. Nothing straight from the bottle for him. Oh, no. Good crystal. Have it. Use it. Have women. Use them, too. "They're calling them the Rapunzel murders," I told him, "the Press. And what do you call your long-haired lady? Dianeme? Like Herrick?" He kept on decanting. Didn't spill a single drop. Then turned and looked at me. Eyes like ice. Smiled.
"Need another session at The Mount with Donaldson, Lisa? Or just some stronger pills?"
The writing had trailed off there, to be resumed after a few empty pages:

Dianeme, in Herrick's poem, had ruby ear-rings. If the poor little tart in the church vault wore ear-rings, they'd be glass. What would Peter's Dianeme wear? Pearls? All they had in common was their hair. And Peter. Hands on the living. Hands on the dead.

Rhoda shivered and pushed the diary aside. All the murdered women had had long hair. Clare's hair had been long, too. And blonde. And who was Peter's Dianeme?

5.