by Jason Arnopp
“How about if we take our break, and then during the second half, all you have to do is drive?” I say. “I’ll take the lead on every job.”
Tyler looks tempted. Then, no doubt sensing the power balance in his favour, he performs a sigh. “I don’t think so.”
“All right, I’ll pay you the extra money myself. How’s that?”
“What do you need to do during this break, exactly – deliver some fuckin’ hashish?”
“Mate, I’m not a drug dealer. Did I really need to clarify that? But I will need to move the truck during this break.”
Tyler looks down his nose at me. “You know that’s fraud, right?”
“Only technically,” I say, even though he’s right. When you drive the ambulance during a break, you’re no longer insured. And yet it happens, and I somehow find myself willing to take the risk.
I sneak another look at Google Maps on Scott’s phone. “No more than a mile,” I add, all too aware that my face has reddened. “We’ll be back in the same spot at the end of the thirty, and you can snooze throughout if you want. Come on, Tyler, you look like you could use a power-nap.”
“Says Little Miss Bags-Under-Her-Eyes… Oh, all right.”
It’s so much easier to gain entry to a block of flats, even in a rougher part of Brighton like Whitehawk, when you wear a paramedic’s uniform and carry a big green bag.
It’s also a lot easier to knock on a complete stranger’s door and greet whoever opens up with an entirely professional and straight face, even when they’re clearly not Gwyneth.
Oh, and when you walk straight into the home of a mid-twenties bruiser with a soccer shirt and a bent nose, you don’t get punched. All he does is say, “Whoa whoa whoa.”
“Hi,” I say, hurrying along the hall. “We received a 999 call from Gwyneth?”
“Not from here you didn’t,” he says. “This is Flat Seventeen, yeah?”
The tiny living room betrays no obvious signs of a female presence. Only empty cider cans, piles of Men’s Health mags and the distinctive eau de man. The bedroom door hangs open, offering more of the same. “Do you recognise the name Gwyneth Cooper at all, sir? Could she be in the building?”
Inside his head, a penny drops. “Actually… G. Cooper. Shit, yeah.” He hands me a stack of letters from off the hall radiator. They’re all addressed to Gwyneth. “If you do find this person, tell her to get a redirect or something, yeah? Been two months since I moved in.”
When did Ali say Gwyneth dropped off the family’s grid: about three months back? Okay, then. Evidently, this guy hasn’t bothered to tell the council he’s the new tenant, if indeed he ever was on the electoral roll.
Feigning irritation, I perform an about-turn, while stuffing Gwyneth’s mail in my pocket. “Great. Seems like another hoax call.”
The front door has drifted shut. The closer I get, the more gouges I can see in the wood. This gets my attention. Like the ones in Scott’s flat, these gouges come in bunches of five, but they cover the whole inside of the door. No wood chips on the ground, though.
“None of my business,” I say, “but do you fire an air rifle in here, or…?”
“Nah. Was like this when I moved in. Landlord hasn’t done fuck all about it.”
“Landlords, eh? Lying bastards.”
“That’s what I get for moving to Shitehawk. Hey, don’t paramedics usually come in pairs on the telly?”
“The TV lies even more than landlords,” I say on my way back to the stairwell. “Sorry to bother you.”
“Hi, Maureen! It’s Kate here.”
Daytime TV buzzes in the background as she tries to remember who I am. “Oh. Oh, yes.” Finally, she summons the strength to inject enthusiasm into her voice. “Hello, dear.”
“I simply had to give you a quick call, because you’ll never guess who I bumped into last night. Ray!”
“Oh, how nice. Was he well?”
“You know, it’s the strangest thing. I never realised Scott and Ray are twins!”
“Really? That is strange. Did Scott never mention that?”
“He didn’t, and so I’m going to have words with him. Ha ha.”
Maureen grants me the faintest hint of a chuckle. “Well, nice to hear from you, dear. How are you doing with the landlord?”
“To be honest, Maureen, he’s giving me the runaround at the moment, but I’m determined to pin him down and get the truth out of him. Have you heard from Scott since I saw you?”
“No, dear. Do tell him to give me a ring, won’t you?”
“Of course. Well, I’d better let you go.”
All right then, so that’s one paranoid idea crossed off the list. Scott was not pretending to be his own twin brother last night.
Really? Just because Scott and Ray genuinely are twins, doesn’t conclusively mean that Scott wasn’t pretending to be Ray.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
The baby lies on the floor between Jill’s legs. A brand-new factory-fresh life, sealed inside its amniotic sac.
Tyler seems particularly happy that we made our pact so that he can stand back and let me deal with this one.
Jill can barely speak through the tears. “Why’s he come out like this? What’s gone wrong?”
“I promise you, this isn’t wrong at all,” I tell her. “It’s absolutely harmless. Napoleon was an en caul birth, and he did all right for himself.”
“This guy’s already taller than Napoleon,” Tyler helpfully chips in.
The sac feels like something between thin tripe, or a really thick sausage skin. The shears I’m using to cut the baby free are the same shears I’ve used to cut through clothes, seatbelts and shoelaces.
As I dry the burbling newborn down, I notice Tyler’s phone in his hand. Which is weird. Not even I, the great smartphone abuser, would do this during a job. Looks like he also has it at a weird angle… pointing this way? Soon as he registers my attention, he looks irritated, then pockets the phone. Hmm. Okay.
Jill has lapsed into a post-partum trance. She looks desolate. “He said he’d be here when the birth happened. He promised me.”
“You’re not alone,” I tell her, surprised by the swelling in my throat. I feel an almost desperate urge to make Jill happier. “Don’t worry, we’re here. Your baby’s fine and everything’s going to be fine. You are not alone.”
As Tyler steers us through the rain to Hove, towards the seventeenth job of the day, the air in our cabin buzzes with energy waiting to be released.
We’ve barely spoken a word since leaving Jill. I’m hyper-tense, partly through being angry with him, but mainly because darkness has fallen. As we drive, our lights cast a vivid strobe-glow onto everything around us. I’ve seen this effect a million times, but now it tweaks me big-style. Houses, fences, road signs, lamp posts, bus stops, the other vehicles, people… all of them get painted a flickering Gwyneth-blue.
To try and keep my eyes off the road, I alternate between checking for online replies from Gwyneth and ripping open her physical letters. Most of these are circulars, but I do find a curt letter from Prescott & Purvue, the management company which handles her flat. Back in July, they wanted to know why she’d stopped paying the rent.
And here’s a bank statement from August to September. The balance on Gwyneth’s account is zero, with no financial activity throughout the month. Inside another envelope, a curt letter from the same bank lists all the direct debits that have failed, due to insufficient funds. The final letter, a red-stamped bill from a gas company, yells about the debt Gwyneth has accrued over the last three months.
Can’t help feeling that these companies won’t be getting paid.
Because she’s dead.
Not necessarily.
Shoving the letters back away, I reach for other possibilities. Could it be that Gwyneth moved abroad? She might have devoted her life to sabotaging dog meat festivals in China.
She’s dead, dead, dead.
She may simply not have told the council abou
t her new address.
She’s dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
Okay. Time to breach the wall of silence in the cabin. The drugs have worn off, leaving me with far less energy for confrontation. Yet I have to address the issue. Can’t help remembering how Tyler filmed Deranged Naked Guy’s rampage yesterday. Did he repeat the trick in a hideously inappropriate manner?
“Tyler, what were you doing with your phone during that last job?”
His glance lobs a Molotov cocktail my way. “Huh? Nothing. Who are you, my boss? I don’t think so, mate.”
“I don’t think so either, but I am your senior crewmate. And if I thought for one minute that you were taking a picture of a patient, or even shooting video…’
Tyler steps on the gas and my head punches back against the seat. “For fuck’s sake, Kate: are you kidding? I would never do that. You’re the one who can’t get enough of their phone. Or phones.”
“So, for the sake of absolute clarity: if you were to show me your camera roll, I wouldn’t see an amniotic sac, is that right?”
Hey, Kate, just FYI: you don’t have the automatic right to look inside the phone of every man on the planet.
“No, you bloody wouldn’t. And for the sake of absolute clarity: if I was to tell Akeem that you’d moved the truck during a break, exactly how much trouble would you be in?”
Shit, Tyler’s checkmated me. How did I allow that to happen?
Does his angry reaction confirm my suspicion? Hard to say. I’ll have to keep a close eye on this man-child from now on. And his phone. Who knows what else he’s been filming, or have I misjudged him? There’s a strong case to be made for my trust levels being low, right now, when it comes to guys and their phones.
Outside, human faces appear in our strobes, then vanish fast, as if they were never there. When seen further away, up ahead, these pedestrians move in herky-jerky steps, just like something out of a child’s flip-book…
When I can’t take any more, I check out Rudolpho’s Facebook and Twitter. Even catching up on his latest moronic philandering has to beat looking outside… until I notice our strobes reflected on Scott’s phone screen too.
The next time Tyler and I speak, it’s to discuss how to treat a woman who’s collapsed in her bathroom, having thrown up and shat herself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
6 October
I’m just a girl, hitting a restaurant on her way home from work, that’s all.
Just fancied some tapas and there’s nothing more to it than that.
Oh, just admit it: you’re petrified to go back to that flat, and so you’re putting it off as long as humanly possible.
Okay, brain. I do rather wish that I’d found a shop to buy more candles. For the sake of my nerves, I’ve chosen to believe light would keep Gwyneth away. Yes, shining a light could be like siphoning all the water from a tank. When you do that, all the fish…
… all those flickering blue sharks…
… can no longer swim around.
God, I’m so on edge tonight that I’m in danger of falling off myself. No matter how cosy this Casa San Marcos place might feel, I can’t stop thinking that anything can now happen in Scott’s flat at any given moment. No matter how much I tell myself that Gwyneth is posting on social media, I still fear that something dead or undead could pop up in that place to say hello… except when I have candles on the go. Since mine have all but burnt down, the later I can stay out the better.
I’m eating this patatas bravas to fuel myself, rather to feed any real appetite. On top of my gut-mashing dread of the Van Spencer, I feel sick from the shame of having bent the system to my own ends today. As much as I tell myself I needed to find out what happened to a missing and possibly dead woman, and that I didn’t do anything to put patients at risk, it rankles all the same.
If today’s sly investigation had produced solid results, then my perversion of the rules might have felt more justified, and yet the facts remain frustratingly out of reach. Soon as I left work this evening, I looked up Prescott & Purvue online, but their office had closed for the night. Of course it had. So now I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to go and quiz them on whether their tenant Ms Cooper moved out or died or disappeared.
Gwyneth still hasn’t replied via Twitter or Facebook. She has, however, publicly shared a meme gif of a cat leaping dramatically up over the top of a staircase, then landing upon a startled dog. So that’s a big bag of lolz, right there.
You know what? I should take a breather from this whole line of enquiry and face WhatsApp instead. The prospect of Scott actually having slept with those other Tinder matches no longer feels so apocalyptic, because Gwyneth feels bigger. Far more significant. Gwyneth draws on both my intrigue and my conscience.
WhatsApp confronts me with a column of mostly female headshots. Some of the names are familiar from Tinder, such as Samantha and Claire, while others are represented only by their phone number.
Look at all this evidence. Once upon a time, people would plan their cheating affairs by speaking verbally through ye olde telephone landlines. Unless physically overheard, their every filthy utterance would vanish without trace. But now, here’s every single incriminating word, laid out like a court transcript. So let’s rejoin Scott and Samantha. I’m sure they merely discussed crochet patterns and the like…
Not wanting to spoiler myself, I zoom all the way to the top of their conversation, most of which happened while I slept beside Scott in his bed. The pair start by talking politely, like the virtual strangers they are, and then the sex gradually oozes into their chat, as they test each other’s boundaries, only to discover there are none. Feels all too familiar.
Scott and Sam’s messages become fast and furious, as they express what they plan to do to each other after their imminent first date. Pretty hot and steamy stuff, too. Admittedly, poor Sam screws up when autocorrect makes her accidentally write, I’m gonna sick on your balls. That’s unfortunate, and she quickly corrects herself with a shocked emoji, before they both post cry-laughing emojis.
Aw, these two were so made for each other. Scott and Sam, eh? Or Scam for short.
Munching some nice Manchego, I scroll back down…
Down, down, deeper and down…
These star-crossed lovers consecrate their beautiful romance by sending each other a close-up picture of their genitals, then trading compliments. Cupid must have felt so flushed with pride that night.
Yesterday, each and every word would have dealt me a gut-punch. Tonight, they barely put me off my stuffed peppers. I now feel more like an autopsy technician, picking through deeply unpleasant remains. What I really want, I suppose, is absolute confirmation. I want proof that Scott actually did fuck someone else, during the short time we were together. This now feels more like a curiosity than some sick self-destructive impulse.
Oh. Okay. Scott and Sam’s WhatsApp chat ends with her saying, I’m here! Got a nice table at the back of the bar. Fifteen minutes later, she says, You running late? followed ten minutes later by, Where are you? Finally, twenty-nine minutes after she arrived, she says, I’m leaving. Thx for wasting my time.
Why do I feel frustrated? That’s a pretty weird reaction, isn’t it?
Not when it’s coming from a freak like you.
Here’s another WhatsApp chat with a pretty young thing called Nola. Black hair, big blue eyes, pale skin. This conversation doesn’t involve sex. Sweet li’l Nola didn’t prove an easy nut to crack like Samantha. Either way, this is one of several chats that originated on Tinder and switched over here, only to shrivel on the vine before a meet could be arranged.
The next chat, with good old Claire from Peacehaven, contains some eye-poppingly feisty sext action. Can’t help but begrudgingly admire this slag’s creatively intense way with words. I mean, she even mentions pre cum. I would never have thought of that, and Scott responds very positively to the notion of Claire teasing it out of him. Are they coiled up in bed somewhere right now, laughing at me?
So… what happened next? Did he arrive late and they ended up having a torrid one-night stand? Or was she so pissed off with him that she couldn’t even bring herself to say she was walking away from the pier alone?
Or did he follow her home and kill her?
Bristling, I crave the kind of unambiguous clarity that WhatsApp seems unable to supply. Why, oh why, can’t people have the common decency to make it clear in their private comms whether or not they actually had sex?
That TrooSelf diary app remains Fort Knox.
Burning New Pathways Into The Brain
Joining The Death Grip Cult
I Am Possessed
Still so infuriating to have no idea what these titles signify.
Especially as you’re starting to wonder exactly how deep Scott’s still waters run, right? You’re not ready to admit that to yourself, because it’s too frightening.
Hey, what about those videos?
That’s right. Change the subject, see if I care.
I haven’t returned to try the videos again since my last attempt killed the handset a second time. With a mouth full of omelette, I ponder how to prevent a third shutdown.
Flipping over to Scott’s browser, I Google for how to stop phone crashing.
Restore to factory settings? Nope, not gonna happen.
Looks like the phone might be all clogged up with data, and I should try deleting some. This is easy enough, and it certainly feels nicely cathartic to ditch all of Scott’s favourite Prince albums, even though they’ll probably be retained in the cloud.
I also follow instructions to clear something I’ve never heard of, called the cache. Once the phone boots back up, I decide to risk opening the Videos folder again. First, though, I make sure I eat the final tapas dish. There’s no telling what I might see in here.