At nine o'clock the same morning, the morning of the 31st, she was awakened by the insistent ringing of her doorbell; and drawing her dressing gown round her hips, she opened the door to find John Binyon on the doorstep: Caroline's mother (Sarah learned) had just rung to say that her daughter had the flu, and would certainly not be getting out of bed that day — let alone getting out of the house; the Haworth Hotel was in one almighty fix; could Sarah? would Sarah? it would be well worth it — very much so — if Sarah could put in a couple of extra days, please! And stay the night, of course — as Caroline had arranged to do, in the nice little spare room at the side, the one overlooking the annexe.
Yes. If she could help out, of course she would! The only thing she couldn't definitely promise was to stay awake. Her eyelids threatened every second to close down permanently over the tired eyes, and she was only half aware, amidst his profuse thanks, of the palms of his hands on her bottom as he leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. He was, she knew, an inveterate womanizer; but curiously enough she found herself unable positively to dislike him; and on the few occasions he had tested the temperature of the water with her he had accepted without rancour or bitterness her fairly firm assurance that for the moment it was little if anything above freezing point. As she closed the door behind Binyon and went back to her bedroom, she felt a growing sense of guilt about her early morning escapade. It had been those wretched (beautiful!) gins and Campari that had temporarily loosened the girdle round her robe of honour. But her sense of guilt was, she knew, not occasioned just by the lapse itself, but by the anonymous, mechanical nature of that lapse. Jenny had been utterly delighted, if wholly flabbergasted, by the unprecedented incident; but Sarah herself had felt immediately saddened and diminished in her own self-estimation. And when finally she had returned to her flat, her sleep had been fitful and unrefreshing, the eiderdown perpetually slipping off her single bed as she had tossed and turned and tried to tell herself it didn't matter.
Now she took two Disprin, in the hope of dispelling her persistent headache, washed and dressed, drank two cups of piping hot black coffee, packed her toilet bag and night-clothes, and left the flat. It was only some twelve minutes' walk down to the hotel, and she decided that the walk would do her nothing but good. The weather was perceptibly colder than the previous day: heavy clouds (the forecasters said) were moving down over the country from the north, and some moderate falls of snow were expected to reach the Midlands by the early afternoon. During the previous week the bookmakers had made a great deal of money after the tenth consecutive non-white Christmas; but they must surely have stopped taking any more bets on a white New Year, since such an eventuality was now beginning to look like a gilt-edged certainty.
Not that Sarah Jonstone had ever thought of laying a bet with any bookmaker, in spite of the proximity of the Ladbrokes office in Summertown which she passed almost daily on her way to work. Passed it, indeed, again now, and stared (surely, far too obviously!) at the man who had just emerged, eyes downcast, from one of the swing-doors folding a pink, oblong betting slip into his wallet. How extraordinarily strange life could become on occasions! It was just like meeting a word in the English language for the very first time, and then — lo and behold! — meeting exactly the same word for the second time almost immediately thereafter. She had seen this same man, for the first time, the previous evening as she had walked up to Jenny's flat at about 9.30 p.m.: middle-aged; greyish-headed; balding; a man who once might have been slim, but who was now apparently running to the sort of fat which strained the buttons on his shabby-looking beige raincoat. Why had she looked at him so hard on that former occasion? Why had she recorded certain details about him so carefully in her mind? She couldn't tell. But she did know that this man, in his turn, had looked at her, however briefly, with a look of intensity which had been slightly (if pleasurably) disturbing.
Yet the man's cursory glance had been little more than a gesture of approbation for the high cheekbones that had thrown the rest of her face into a slightly mysterious shadow under the orange glare of the street lamp which illuminated the stretch of road immediately outside his bachelor flat. And after only a few yards, he had virtually forgotten the woman as he stepped out with a purpose in his stride towards his nightly assignation at the Friar.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday, December 31st
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of all the rules.
(GEORGE ORWELL, Shooting an Elephant)
IN VIEW OF THE events described in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that from the start of subsequent police investigations Sarah Jonstone's memories should have resembled a disorderly card index, with times and people and sequences sometimes hopelessly confused. Interview with one interrogator had been followed by interview with another, and the truth was that her recollection of some periods of December 31st had grown as unreliable as a false and faithless lover.