The Perfect Sinner

‘Look it’s in your interests. You’ll be under siege here in half an hour. Talk to us and we’ll help keep the reptiles off your back, see?’

‘What do you mean? You are the reptiles. Why am I going to be under siege?’

The phone rang and all their eyes switched to the machine on the side table. She didn’t want to answer, not while they were still here. It rang three times, then the answering machine cut in and she realised, as she heard the caller’s voice, that it was switched on to ‘monitor’.

‘Hello, Beth my darling,’ said Alan Livesay’s unmistakable voice, ‘I’m so, so very sorry about…’ She hit the button and killed the call but it was far, far too late and the balance of power in the room had changed irrevocably.

‘Well, how about that, darling,’ said the larger man. ‘Isn’t that just our lucky day?’

‘He calls everyone that,’ she said, but she could feel the heat in her cheeks and she knew they could see it. The smaller man produced the camera he had been holding behind his back and something in her snapped. She reached for the closest object she could find, her kitchen fire extinguisher, pressed down the lever and sprayed foam all over both of them.

She propelled them out of her flat, downstairs and through the front door on a wave of sheer fury, then went back up and looked out of her window to see them stopping on the pavement for the larger one to use his mobile phone and the smaller one to take pictures of the front of her house. It was still only half past seven in the morning.

After a long time the phone rang again. In the intervening hour, she hadn’t moved from the kitchen chair where she sat staring at the table and her unopened pile of mail. The room already seemed to belong to a time line which had come to an end.

‘Beth, pick up the phone,’ said a familiar male voice, the voice of authority, of tradition, of the way things are meant to be done in the Civil Service. Sir Robert Greenaway, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, was not somebody you could ever ignore. She picked up the receiver as if it were a landmine.

‘Is that you, Beth?’

‘Yes, Sir Robert.’

He dispensed with courtesies. ‘There’s a story starting to run on the wires. It’s linking you and Livesay.’

‘Two men broke into my flat this morning. They said they were from a news agency.’

‘They were. Be quiet and listen please. I’m not going to ask you if it’s true. That can come later. We have quite enough on our plate here already thanks to your friend the late minister. Now, understand me clearly. I don’t want you anywhere near this place until further notice. I strongly advise that you leave your house in the next ten minutes if not sooner. After that you’ll have the whole of Fleet Street camping on your step. Go away somewhere they can’t find you. My office will call you on your mobile in a day or two. Don’t talk to anybody and get going now. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘Officially you are on sick leave. Pack what you need and get going.’

That was that. He had put the phone down.

The first of them arrived as she was leaving. He was very young and, as she came out of the gate, he was running down the street from a taxi stuck behind a truck a hundred yards down the street.

‘Elizabeth Battock?’ he called as he ran towards her.

‘No mate,’ she said in the best Australian accent she could muster. ‘She’s up on the second floor,’ and she left him ringing the bell as she got in her car and drove away.

West seemed the best direction, west out of London by the quickest route. She drove down the M4 for an hour and then the full irony of what she was doing struck her as she realised she had absolutely nowhere to go. Hotels were out of the question. She’d have to pay by credit card and after her New York shopping spree there was a double risk, identification and credit refusal. Friends? She could stay with a friend. No one in London, that wouldn’t do, anyway they were all in the politics business, people to share your triumphs with, not your crises. She wouldn’t trust any of them at a time like this, not when there were useful points to be banked by helping out a journalist or two. There was Maggie. Where did Maggie live now? She hadn’t seen her since graduation. Her address was somewhere, probably on the Christmas card list in her kitchen drawer. Beth could see the list in her mind’s eye. It was just the start of a list really.

Something quite like tiredness came over her then and she pulled over at the next service area. Wiltshire felt like a safe distance away and, after she’d unloaded her bitter-smelling coffee and pallid sandwich on to the most remote table, she rummaged in her bag for an address book just in case it showed she had a forgotten best friend somewhere. Instead, she found the stack of post that she had stuffed in there on the way out of the flat and, for want of anything better to do, she started opening the envelopes.

It was mostly dross, bills, junk mail, one wedding invitation from a colleague she didn’t much like and an invitation to speak at an Institute of Strategic Studies seminar, but there underneath was the other letter she had accidentally swept up with the rest, the letter she had left unopened before she went away to America, waiting for a right moment to open it, a moment which might never arrive.

The envelope was handwritten and postmarked Devon. It bore her old address in Fulham and someone had crossed that out and forwarded it, which, a whole year since she had moved, was the sort of miracle she would prefer not to happen. She stared at it for a long time before using a table knife to open it as if something inside might lunge at her fingers.

‘My dear Beth,’ it said, and she really had almost forgotten how to read his handwriting. ‘I know you are very busy these days, but I wonder if you might be able to come down to see us soon. It seems such an age since we talked and there is a lot to talk about. It is very beautiful down here at the moment. The flowers are out around the Ley. Eliza misses you. She would be glad to see you. She had a postcard, I know. Ring the Turners if you can come. They’ll give me the message. All my love, Dad.’

Tainted sanctuary. An invitation to the one place where nobody would go looking for her, the place nobody knew about. An invitation to the last place she wanted to go. There was no other hiding place in prospect but even then it was the most reluctant of decisions.

The motorway ended at Exeter and the endless stream of traffic heading towards Cornwall and the south-west tip of England clogged both lanes of the A38. Absurdly, she had to stop and check the map to be sure of her way. She had owned her own car for four years now and it was the first time she had driven down this way.

Below the teeming A38, Devon bulges down to the coast and that bulge is known as the South Hams. It is marked at first by miniature rounded hills, wearing clumps of trees as toupees on their very tops to stop the wind blowing the soil away. Further south, towards the coast, a gentle oceanic swell of ridges prepares you for the real waves ahead. Signs of tourism are all too plain on the larger roads that skirt around it, but in the middle of it all, inland from Start Bay, is a less trampled area of fields, lanes and not much else which retains some of the utter remoteness of past centuries.

Beth was not in a mood to be charmed as the hedges crept in on her and slowed her pace. She was a London driver to the depths of her soul, carving others up and expecting to be carved up in her turn, always ready with the quick hand gesture and always reacting in fury if she was given one first. The road from Totnes to Kingsbridge began to test her patience. With blind corner after blind corner, crests and hidden dips, there was nowhere to overtake for miles, The Dartmouth turning took her on to a road which was little better, but when she took the long-forgotten right turn signposted to Slapton, even the white line in the middle of the road disappeared.

It was a warm afternoon and she was driving with the window down, but the scent from the high banks bordering the road only made her feel uncomfortable and out of place. She hated the way the banks pressed in on her as if she were going down an ever-narrowing trap which might not allow her the space to turn around and escape again. After a mile or so she came up behind a small, silver Nissan which was being driven with quite unnatural caution. On the infrequent straight sections the driver, a very old man, would speed up to nearly twenty-five miles per hour, but when confronted by anything approaching a bend, he would slow to fifteen, restrained it seemed by his equally old wife who could be seen waving her hands in the air at any sign of a hazard. Once and only once the road straightened and widened enough for Beth to try overtaking, but the old man had no idea that she was behind him and pulled into the middle of the road as she began to pass. Neither occupant showed any response to her horn-blast so she added deafness to the list she was compiling of their characteristics and fell back in behind them again.

After a very long time and a fairly short distance, they came to a road junction where the couple in front, missing their chance to pull out, waited instead for a very slow tractor to pass in front of them. The tractor was followed by a long line of cars. When the road cleared, they still showed no sign of moving. She waited a little longer and gave another peep on her horn. There was no response. She got out, walked up to the other car and looked inside and her heart thumped. The man and the woman inside were indeed extremely old. They also looked quite dead, their heads lolling forward and their eyes closed. A series of irrational possibilities came to her. Had she killed them? Had her hooting given them both heart attacks? Could their exhaust be leaking? Maybe the carbon monoxide had been blown away by the wind until they stopped, then the inside of the car had filled up with a lethal dose. She took her courage in both hands and opened the driver’s door, and that was when the driver woke up.

‘Hello,’ he said with a puzzled smile, ‘can I help you?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Were you asleep!’

‘Asleep? No, no. Oh. Oh dear, yes, perhaps I was.’ He looked around and seemed to find nothing particularly unusual in that. ‘I think we must have been having a little nap. Been for a walk you see. Did you want something?’

‘You’re in the middle of the road.’

‘Bless my soul, are we? I’m so sorry. Did you hear that Em? We’ve been asleep. In the road.’ Em showed no sign of waking.

‘Look I’m in a hurry,’ said Beth. ‘Can you just pull over and let me by.’

‘Let me see, yes, of course, of course,’

Beth got back in her car and the car in front started to move, but instead of pulling over, it meandered off again in the same direction as her and she swore viciously. Then it occurred to her that it really didn’t matter. She couldn’t have been in less of a hurry. No one knew she was coming and she didn’t even want to arrive. It was just that there was nowhere else to go. As the road became still narrower, the car in front suddenly put on an unwise burst of speed and shot off out of sight, suggesting that some physical need more urgent than sleep had overtaken its occupants. Beth didn’t speed up. The lane she was now driving down, and it was no more than that, should have been intensely familiar. She had walked it a thousand times in her childhood when it had been the lane home, but that didn’t help. She recognised it as if someone had spent many hours describing it to her, not as if she had lived there for two thirds of her life. Adding to that feeling of disjuncture, she caught a momentary glimpse through a gap to her right of something genuinely unfamiliar, a large house down in the valley below the road where she had no memory of such a place. Then it was too late for unfamiliarity because she was coming down the hill. Slapton, steep, cramped Slapton crowded in on her, and there ahead, looming over the cottages with its squadrons of rooks flying around the ivy wrappings of its derelict battlements, was the dark tower which was all that remained of Slapton Chantry.

The main road was a twisting gulley running down between stone walls as the village came rushing in to smother her, and when she finally found a tiny gap to squeeze the car into, she sat in it and waited for the courage to do what came next.

The front door of Carrick Cottage opened straight on to the road and the flaking blue paint on the door was just as it had always been. Beth looked to the side and saw the same frayed blue curtains. She put her finger to the bell, then hesitated and ran her hand up and down the stones beside the door until she found the gap where the key used to be hidden. It was no longer there. No one else needed it these days. For a moment she was the child who had lived there, but only for a moment. She rang the bell just as a stranger would.

The man who came to the door was not at all as he had always been. He had changed so much that for a moment she thought he was someone else. He was two stone lighter than when she had last seen him, but despite that he had put on far more years than the calendar showed. He looked at her as if he were equally bemused.

‘Beth?’ he said, ‘It’s Beth!’ and she saw a gleam of moisture appear immediately in the corner of each eye.

‘Hello Dad,’ she said and, being unable to kiss him, she put out both her hands and took his as they stared at each other.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ he said, ‘being so busy.’

She wondered if he still read a paper, if indeed he had any idea that the hounds were baying at her heels.

‘Yes, I’ve come,’ she said. ‘Can we go in?’

‘Can you stay for tea?’ he asked as if he expected her to disappear again at any moment.

‘I was hoping to stay a bit longer than that,’ Beth replied, ‘if that’s all right.’

He nodded. ‘That would be nice. Your room’s all ready, just in case.’