Without Consent by Frances Fyfield Page A

honest victim had been raped and buggered by two burglars. The quilt had been made out of cut-offs from her children’s clothes, pieces of it torn in the process of analysis for stains, but she still wanted it back, if only to prove that the one set of memories it invoked were far more important than the other.
    That’s what I deal with too, she wanted to tell Bailey: bravery. And that’s what Ryan was good at. Finding the truth.
    â€˜What I really want to know,’ Bailey said carelessly, as if all previous conversation was irrelevant, ‘is why Ryan kept this file?’ He was flourishing a slim folder, using it to fan himself before he handed it across.
    â€˜Which file?’ she asked stupidly, blushing as if Bailey had unearthed something incriminatory. There was no such thing, after all, as a totally clean record. If he were to delve around in anyone’s career, even if their daily progress was far less documented than that of any police officer, this spy could always find some embarrassing piece of shit. Even furry little rabbits leave turds. It must have been Ryan who said that.
    Bailey sat and the room grew smaller. Putting on his glasses failed to make him human. He rose again and pulled open the fussy venetian blinds, letting in light through the small window-panes. The blinds had always stuck before, even when new – Ryan had comments forthem, too – but these long fingers of his older mentor commanded obedience out of inanimate things and, suddenly, there was light. Sally was afraid of Bailey, the way, as a child, she had been afraid of the old woman in the story who lived in the forest in a cottage made of cake.
    T he computer print in the file blurred in front of her eyes. She sat bolt upright, reading the faint lettering, resentful, ready to come up with any old answer. The print was made for daylight. She was half aware that Bailey had left the room; there was a distant flush of the lavatory cistern and the sound of the kettle boiling again. Then he was back. Sounds echoed in an unoccupied house. More tea, as if to prove he could make it better. She hated tea, the drink of comfort and a swollen bladder.
    The windows needed cleaning, she noticed; he made her aware of such details. They were smudged rather than filthy, but enough to deserve attention.
    â€˜I know what it looks like,’ she said. ‘He’s got the names and addresses and descriptions of several no-hopers. Girls who’ve been in here. Cases which’ll go no further. And their witnesses, few that there are. He’s got that disco girl and Shelley Pelmore, the one he’s supposed to have raped. And I suppose you’re thinking it may be his version of a little black book, aren’t you?’
    â€˜They have one thing in common,’ Bailey said evenly. ‘All those names. All those girls, women, I mean; he’s quite specific about that, they’re all unmarried. Perhaps one or two of them would appreciate a visit from a good-looking sympathetic policeman. Liars maybe, vulnerable maybe, but so far, incapable of completing their accusations andmaybe needing a nice broad shoulder, or something of the kind.’
    She would have flared at him like a rocket hitting the ceiling in that confined space; she could, after all, see exactly the way it looked. To the naked eye this small compendium of names and addresses was horrifying. We do not rely on photos of victims, she wanted to say, but surely he knew, even in his old-fashioned way, how that would make them feel. We make pictorial histories; we write notes as if computers did not exist. Here was Ryan’s inventory of the victims who had never got beyond the DCI’s no-action dictate. Not all of them; only some: five, or was it six? Bailey seemed drunk on tea. It was an added insult that he had the kind of long lean frame which need never resort to saccharin in order to keep it in that awkward state of angular thinness. Skeleton