Alice – Dr Alice Kennedy – was conducting her Wednesday evening surgery; the shoulder of local lamb was roasting, with a selection of Moroccan-spiced vegetables softening under it, and sending delectable vapours upstairs; a particularly flavoursome Cabernet Sauvignon was breathing; and the setting sun was driving a magnificent, red-gold track across the dark sea.
Marking Year Nine’s maths should have been a reassuring task. Here in these dog-eared books everything was either right or wrong. Nearly right, as she always told her pupils at the start of the year, was wrong. But tonight the familiar satisfaction just wouldn’t come. Too many uncomfortable ideas were swilling about Greta’s mind.
The Admiral was dead. You couldn’t forget that if you had any sort of human kindness in you. And Greta had quite a bit. He’d turned into a buffoon in the last few years, but there had never been any malice in him; and in the old days he’d been generous and funny, as well as reasonably good-looking. Now he was dead.
In the village they were all saying the Admiral had done it himself because of the pub’s debts, but that was bonkers. In spite of the buffoonery, Fitz had never lost his essential decency, and no one who cared about other people would commit suicide without leaving a note. No way, as the girls would say. And so far the police hadn’t revealed whether there had been a note or not.
You’d have to be incredibly angry to kill yourself in a way that would land unjust suspicion on everyone you’d left behind. You’d have to be incredibly unhappy, too. Greta gazed at the heavenly view outside the small attic window of her study and couldn’t really bear the thought that Fitz’s bluff public manner might have hidden dreadful suffering.
Don’t think about it now, she told herself. It won’t do you any good. And you’ve got to finish the marking before supper or you’ll never be able to relax. And that wouldn’t be fair on Alice, not when she’s dealing with so many patients on the brink. She needs you calm and supportive just now.
Greta reached for the next worksheet and shuddered at the name written on it. Calm and supportive were not likely characteristics in anyone who’d become one of Tracy Crofts’ victims. Even so, Greta made herself pay proper attention to Tracy’s proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. However irritating the child was, her work deserved to be taken seriously. It wasn’t bad. Tracy had a brain, which made her shenanigans even more irritating. And dangerous.
In normal circumstances, Greta wouldn’t have wasted a second’s anxiety on Tracy’s idiotic threat. After all, Greta and Alice had been a fixture in Crabwell for the past seven years, most people knew they were a couple, and no one bothered about them. As Fitz himself had once said, they didn’t frighten the horses. Besides which, Alice was the best GP for miles around, and Greta had earned a great reputation for getting her girls through GCSE maths and on to higher things. There was no one else around here who’d bother to run the local Girl Guides either, and someone had to do something to keep the girls occupied and thinking of something other than…
She dropped Tracy’s work on the desk and covered her face with both hands, rubbing the palms up and down her cheeks. The gesture did nothing for her headache, or the sore patch inside her cheek, where her grinding teeth so often caught the soft flesh.
Someone needed to save Tracy from herself, and her feckless parents weren’t likely to do it, so Greta had tried. She’d talked to Tracy in a quiet moment on the last camping trip, but the attempt had failed.
Greta understood the difficulty without any trouble at all. Tracy was being driven to a quite unusual degree by her teenage hormones, or evolution, the selfish gene, or whatever you wanted to call it. All her instincts were telling her to polish up her charms and display them as clearly as she could until a suitable sperm donor picked her as his chosen receptacle. She had already got a reputation around Crabwell for being at it like a rabbit. But Tracy wasn’t a rabbit, or a praying mantis, or even a fur seal. She was a human being with seventy or eighty more years of life to come. If those years were to be remotely happy, she was going to have to learn to know herself, find fulfilling work of her own, and only then choose the mate with whom she could reproduce her genes.
All Greta’s recommendations of keeping her options open, getting good enough results to gain access to a good university and so have the chance of an interesting career made Tracy laugh like the hyena she wasn’t. Greta could almost see the thought bubbles coming out of Tracy’s head about poor old bags and disappointed lesbians. She offered Tracy her copy of Gaudy Night, hoping that Dorothy L. Sayers’s demonstration of the importance of doing your own work and not confining yourself to life as someone else’s helpmeet might do the trick.
She herself had found such succour in Sayers’s good sense when she’d been faced with an awful decision years and years ago that she couldn’t believe anyone would reject it. But that attempt had been a failure too. And it was after Tracy had spurned the novel that she’d made her silly threat. Silly but horrible.
‘If you tell anyone about me,’ she had said, ‘I’ll tell them all that you’re just jealous because I wouldn’t let you touch me.’
No one in Crabwell would pay any attention. But if the sleazy man from the telly encouraged Tracy to say it on camera there could be real trouble. These days no one would – or should – ignore any suggestion of paedophilia, and the fact that there was no evidence could make everything worse. The police would have to be involved, and, as far as Greta could see from the various stories that had recently emerged in the news, they’d publicise her name and the accusation in the hope that other victims would come forward. She could be on police bail for years until they realised that there were no victims at all, and never had been, and that they’d been manipulated by a naughty little trollop, who needed to distract attention from her own carryings-on.
Alice would hate it. Come to that, Greta would hate it too. And it could ruin their reputations and the careers to which they’d devoted everything.
But that didn’t change the one crucial fact: someone had to rescue Tracy before she let her instincts dump her in a dead-end under-age relationship, perhaps with a baby, and no chance of using her brains or creativity, or anything else. And what future would that baby have?
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