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

"Pretty powerful," she told him, "and you handle it well."
He was young enough to appreciate the compliment, but not quite old enough to receive it graciously.
"Any fool," he said bitterly, "can drive a car."
"Here's one fool," she lied tactfully, "who can't." Lies were becoming a habit. She tried to soothe him with another. "It has been a good day out. I've enjoyed it."
He glanced at her but didn't answer.

6.

Grief can be assuaged to some degree by photographs of the dead, Maybridge mused, as he examined the photograph of Lisa that Meg had found. You hold on to memories. An image propped up on a mantelpiece. On a bedroom dressing-table that catches the morning light. Framed on a living-room wall. When the pain eases you look at it less often. The wound heals partly, in some cases completely.
His contact with the bereaved in the course of his police work was always traumatic, all deaths unnatural, no soothing inevitability about any of them. On a few later visits, when shock had been blunted by time, the photographs had appeared. The victims (children, some of them, and those were the most heartbreaking), were shown as they had been, unmarked by violence. Mary Luce, the youngest of Hixon's victims, had been photographed on her eighteenth birthday, a few months before she was murdered. The studio portrait had been handed to him by Mary's mother.
"Look," she'd said. "Just look." And then, after a pause, "She looks back at you, doesn't she? Innocent. Trusting. Do whores look like that? Well - do they? That animal raped her. She'd never been with a man before."
It wasn't true. She had been at the trial and heard all the forensic evidence relating to Mary and the other victims, but when those you love are dead you have to protect your memory of them, and if that means pushing the truth around until it is almost acceptable, then that's what you have to do. The horror of Mary's death by strangulation couldn't be articulated; the shock of discovering her daughter's whoring could be - and denied. Maybridge had said, sadly and honestly, that she had been a pretty young woman. A lovely photograph. Encouraged, she had brought out an album of snaps and shown him many more. Mary at school. On holiday. At a disco. Different phases of growing up. Happy moments caught for ever and proudly displayed. The photo of Lisa, a snapshot was a good one. Very clear.
"Yes," Maybridge said, handing it back to Meg, "you're right. Simon would like to have it. It will mean more to him than to anyone. Especially now."
The evening was pleasantly cool after a very hot day. He had been watering the bedding plants at the base of the patio and the soil smelt sharp, like ginger. Soon it would be time for their evening tipple - Guinness for him and a small brandy for Meg. A quiet period together, he watching Sports Night on the telly and Meg catching up on some letters she had to write. She had come across the photo when she had been looking for an address book in the bureau a few minutes ago and had called him in from the garden to see it. He asked her where it had been taken.
"At the opening ceremony of the children's library. Up at the school. She'd done a mural for it - oh, a very harmless, childish one, I'd warned her, and it was okay. Very good, in fact. Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. Everyone looking rather sweet."
Lisa producing anything remotely sweet was hard to imagine. "You should have taken her standing in front of the mural. On her own. This is outside. It's a pity she's one of a crowd."
Meg agreed. "But everyone is standing behind her, luckily. She's in a prominent position. Peter is in there somewhere." She looked for him and found him. "Here - at the back. I should have asked him to move forward but I was focusing on Lisa. She looked so natural. Not posing. The snap could be enlarged and the background cut away. Should I have that done, do you think? Or give it to Simon as it is?"
"As it is. He'd rather have his father in it."
"It's odd he doesn't have a single photograph of his parents anywhere. At a time like this they're usually put on display. They're needed."
Which was precisely what Maybridge had been thinking.

Meg, in most matters very honest, didn't tell her husband that taking the snap to Simon was partly a pretext to suss out the woman who was living with him. She guessed Tom knew, of course, and half expected to be told to tread gently, that she wasn't on her own domestic territory. When she had heard from a social worker about David's crazy alliance with a pot-smoking unmarried mother of four he'd met in a squat, she had been so dismayed she had jack-booted tact into the ground and her son hadn't come home again for almost a year. His first visit back, on his nineteenth birthday, had been a period of unvoiced mutual apologies. A carpet slipper approach to everything. His new girlfriend, sharp, glossy, a non-smoker of anything and too bright to get pregnant, hadn't been Meg's ideal of a soul mate, either. But she had smiled and shut up. This time, not emotionally or maternally involved, to smile should come more easily and careful comment was just a matter of being polite.
Meg visited mid-afternoon on Friday, the day when she had no tutorials at the university. It was blustery, with a hint of rain in the air, and she wore a thick blue handknitted jersey over a navy blue pleated skirt. The wicker basket she carried contained a couple of jars of raspberry jam and a jar of Indian chutney, products bought at the church fete. Also in the basket was one of Lisa's books, A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. And, on top of it, a carton of six free-range eggs.
It didn't occur to her that she looked like a stereotyped country housewife. Bland. Tending towards plumpness. Reassuringly ordinary.
And it didn't occur to Rhoda, who opened the door dressed in an old green caftan of Lisa's, that she looked like a mediaeval looter of clothes of the dead.
Meg, recognising the caftan as the one Lisa used to wear when she was painting, and the woman inside it as the one who had dropped the camera in the church porch, felt a hot rage burn up in her cheeks and for a moment she couldn't speak. How dare this woman come here and take possession?
Rhoda, mistaking the flush of anger for a blush of shyness, was reminded of Simon. She asked the caller with the basket of goodies if she had called to see him. Meg, still speechless, nodded.
Rhoda graciously asked her in. "Simon's down in the orchard doing some scything. Apparently there used to be a regular gardener but he hasn't been recently. Shall we go through to the kitchen?" She led the way and suggested that Meg should put the basket on the table. "All those nice things. That chutney looks lovely. Everyone is so kind to him." "Are they?" said Meg drily. Not. overtly, hostile. But almost. She introduced herself. "I'm Meg Maybridge. My husband and I have been friends with Simon and his parents for many years."
Rhoda began emptying the basket while she reassessed the situation. One of the eggs rolled out of the carton and cracked. She picked it up and wiped the slight ooze with her forefinger. Maybridge. One of the policemen who carried Peter's coffin. "Your husband is the superintendent who gave the address at the funeral?"
"Detective Chief Inspector. And - yes - he read the excerpt from the Bible."
"Very sympathetically. It was well chosen." No gush this time. Total honesty.
Meg relaxed a little. "It was important to choose something that wouldn't hurt Simon. Some passages are too full of doom and damnation. It's an Eastern ethos, of course. Difficult to relate to." Mentally she cautioned herself: Don't be sidetracked. She hasn't told you her name yet. You're not supposed to know it. See if her story tallies with Simon's.
"And you are?"
Rhoda removed the jam. "Home made? He'll enjoy it."
Meg smiled. Said nothing.
Rhoda stopped stalling. "Rhoda Osborne. I'm a journalist. I thought Simon had told you last time you called. Or maybe it was another visitor." Simon had referred to her as Meg and she hadn't made the connection. This lady was no pussycat. A little gentle stroking wouldn't do. Her position here would have to be made tenable - somehow.
The kitchen smelt of soup spilt on to the electric burner. It had splashed on to her jeans and shirt, too, but luckily hadn't scalded her. Her clothes were tossing on the rotary drier in view of the window. She indicated them and explained. "That's why I'm wearing this. With Simon's permission, of course. I haven't brought much in the way of spare clothes - didn't intend staying more than a few days. The caftan happened to be handy - it was up in the studio where I'm working." Stalling an immediate analysis of her 'work', she hurried on. "I've never worn anything of Lisa's before. You must have thought it shockingly insensitive of me, but there wasn't any option. I think her clothes and Peter's should be packed away and given to a charity. Would it be crass of me to suggest it? Would it be more acceptable coining from you?"
A neatly turned conversation. A necessary statement made.
Meg, not fooled but mollified, went along with it. The trespasser trespassed within limits. "It wouldn't be crass coming from either of us, but it's up to Simon to say who's to do it - and when. How long have you known him?"
It was the obvious question and she had been expecting it. As far as Simon was concerned, it had to be honest. "Briefly. His father used to mention him quite a lot - Lisa, not so much. I suppose you know he's not going back to Collingwood - and he's not taking up his place in medical school?"
Meg hadn't known. She sensed it was another devious twist in the conversation away from Rhoda, but was genuinely upset by what she had been told. David had chucked university, too, and had been in and out of jobs ever since. A stint on an oil rig. A season on a trawler. Courier with a travel firm. And now, and for the first time, an indoor job portering for Christie's. Humping antiques, he called it, a prelude to selling them at a million a bid.
"Does Kester-Evans, Simon's headmaster, know?"
"I couldn't say. I haven't discussed it with Simon. He just told me he'd written to the medical school -Bart's, or wherever - and that was that. It's his life. His decision. He'll be happy in his own way. Eventually." She noticed the book in the bottom of the basket. "Is this for Simon?"
"It was his mother's. I suggest we take it to Peter's study and put it with the rest of the books. Perhaps you know Housman's poems?"
Rhoda didn't. "Quite jolly little country pieces," she said, flipping through the pages, scarcely glancing at them. "Should cheer him up."
Meg looked at her thoughtfully. If this woman were the journalist she professed to be, then her knowledge of literature was sadly lacking. Or was she, Meg, being unfair? What had journalism to do with literature, anyway? Precious little. Some of the poems were deeply depressing. Death on the gallows and dust to dust - and so on - and so on. If Rhoda had been one of her students she would have told her so. "Not as happy as they might seem," was all she could politely say. "He might like to read, them later on. Not yet."
The two women were in the study when Simon came in from the garden, hot and sweaty, with wet grass on his shoes. Rhoda was leaning against his father's desk, her head tilted back, her long hair brushing against a silver penholder. There was nothing aggressive in her attitude; she was, in fact, smiling. Meg, seated, looking up at her - a disadvantaged position - was smiling, too. There was an aura of combat in the air. "Lisa," Meg was saying, "was a very private person. It's hard to imagine she'd want to be featured in a magazine or newspaper - or whatever you intend. She shunned publicity when her book was published. She's that kind of person."
"Was," Rhoda reminded her softly. "Simon will have the last word about this when the profile of his mother is completed." She turned and saw him standing by the door. "My being here isn't bothering you too much, is it Simon? Mrs Maybridge thinks perhaps it is. That the whole idea upsets you."
Meg, about to protest that she had said nothing of the sort, bit her lip and was silent. She hadn't said it, but obviously she had implied it. She waited for Simon's answer.
His anger grew slowly as he realised what was happening. Meg Maybridge had come here to pry. She had come to get Rhoda out. "No," he said, trying to keep his voice calm, "I'm not upset. Not about anything. This was my parents' home. Now it's mine. I say who is to come and who is to go. You don't have to worry about me. Rhoda is here because I want her to be here. What she is doing is okay."