Trial by Fire by Frances Fyfield Page A

have shown all that disgust when she took off her clothes. Darling, I was thinking of you; the contrast was too awful for words.
    Antony felt the marks on his face, almost gone but still noticeable, the stigma of shame.
    Christ, what a cat; more like a tiger, hurling herself at him, but all the same, he should never have struck back, never used conduct unbecoming to any kind of gentleman.
    Christine readjusted her position, ascending slowly and reluctantly from sleep, muttered, and smiled at him, one eye open. 'Feel like an old lady,' she said. 'Tell me when it's tomorrow and hand me a stick to get upstairs. Can't manage on my own.' The eye closed; she dozed as he stroked her pale hair, movements involuntary to hide the sudden heaving of heart, which was deafening to his own ears. Stick, she had said. Hand me a stick. The word 'stick'
    beat against his skull like a gong.
    Walking stick, his own, an affectation since teenage years and his first reading of Wordsworth striding about the Lake District and Keats stirring autumn leaves. Milton leaning on one in his blindness. He had clasped his walking stick like a talisman through his student days of floppy bow ties, floppier hair, and caped coats; kept it now to accompany the heavy cords, designer hiking boots, and poisonous French cigarettes he carried to school. The stick was his adolescent symbol, the adult prop to individuality, and the staff room joke.
    Stick. Walking stick. He looked around the room wildly. Where was it? Thrust into a corner here? In his own untidy house? In his car? Probably in his car. Surely in the back of his car where it lay whenever he forgot it, as he had forgotten it often since Christine, forgotten it entirely over the last twelve days. Antony had a vision of the stick, the carved wooden handle
    — an elephant's head, quite inappropriately — smooth on the top from years of use, with a rubber ferrule that had perished and needed replacement.
    Everything he had tried to blank from his mind rose like scum on a pond: he heard the swish of the stick as he walked through trees, remembered gripping it tighter as she had moved toward him, shut his eyes and attempted one more time to see it lying in the back of the Morris earlier that evening, failed. There was no denying the last place he had carried that stick, the last thing he had done with it.
    Ten-thirty, dark. Helen bound the files together with white tape, each complete, annotated with notes, consigned to memory in preparation for Monday morning. No matter how much she did in her office, homework always remained for the peaceful hours when she could give scrupulous attention to detail. She never made a conscious demarcation zone between home and work. If you were a lawyer, you were one all the time: nothing stopped when you closed the office door.
    She looked at the room and the empty eye of the television, content with the evening's work, peaceful without Bailey. Well, my man, I haven't had a hard week, but I think for once I shan't wait up for you. Surely you're allowed home before midnight after last night and the night before? I understand completely: I'd be the same in your shoes, but it doesn't stop me missing you by this time of night.
    Àll depends,' Bailey had said. 'whether we get any leads on this thing or not. Might know who she is, or someone might tell us. She wasn't wearing so much as an earring. No fingerprints left, but there's always the teeth. See how we go.'
    To be fair, he had telephoned once about seven o'clock. Someone, he said, had reported a missing wife, same age as this poor body in the mortuary. Nothing, really, only a disappearance coinciding with a death. Well, something perhaps. Oh, and a daughter, tugging his arm, saying Mr Bailey, let me tell you something: she was always going to those woods.
    With a man, she went with my teacher, Mr Bailey; I thought you ought to know. My father doesn't know, Mr Bailey. Please don't say I told you. Poor child. Bailey, coolest man