Faith

by Peter James

  During a break for lunch when they went outside for air, DS Anson told him that his hobby was archery. That was how he relaxed: huge bows that took one hundred and thirty five pounds of pressure to draw them, with high-tech arrows that cost twenty pounds each. On Saturday night Oliver's brother had been shot dead, and one consequence was an impromptu lesson on archery: how to hold a bow, how to pull back the arrow, sight the bow, how to fire it. In the battles against the French, those English archers were tough guys, the detective had told him proudly. At Agincourt, English archers killed eight thousand Frenchmen in seven minutes.

  The detective's big, archer hands were now in the air, rotating against each other, symbolising two gears not quite meshing. 'You and your brother, Dr Cabot. Would you say you got along well as boys? Any sibling rivalry?' He proffered the crumpled bag of sunflower seeds. Oliver declined. Anson popped one in his mouth and chewed. He had been pleased to discover that Oliver approved of them.

  Faith occupied Oliver's mind right now. For the past hour he'd sensed that something was wrong, that she was distressed, needed him. He might be imagining it, he knew, and that was why he needed to hear her voice.

  'It is quite normal for there to be an element of sibling rivalry,' Detective Sergeant Anson persisted. 'Perhaps you could cast your mind back to your childhood.'

  Faith Ransome. She was the only beacon of light in this darkness, the only thing that made him want to go on living. And he was so scared for her. Scared that if he didn't make her better… Scared of what her bastard husband might do to her if Harvey's death had been his botched handiwork.

  'What are you doing? Some kind of Freud thing on me?' he said, angrily. 'What the hell are these jerk-off questions you keep slipping in? I loved my brother, I did not shoot him and I did not hire a hitman to shoot him.'

  'Dr Cabot, I can understand how you feel —'

  'Can you?' Oliver interrupted. 'Did you ever lose a brother?'

  Ignoring the question, the detective said, 'Eighty per cent of murders in this country are domestic, within families. I need to be able to eliminate that possibility.'

  'You already have the guy who killed my brother.'

  'A suspect,' Anson corrected.

  'Bullshit. You know he did it.'

  'What we don't know is why. Was he acting alone, or did someone pay him to do it, and if so, who?'

  'I told you that you should question Faith Ransome's husband.'

  'I have his name noted. He will be interviewed as part of our enquiries.'

  'But you haven't done it yet! For God's sake, this man should be a prime suspect. Just because he's a doctor and has some veneer of respectability, you don't seem to be taking what I say about him seriously.'

  'With respect, Dr Cabot, you are a doctor yourself.' He smiled.

  Strangely Oliver found himself smiling back. The guy might be weird with his sunflower seeds and his passion for primitive weaponry but at least he had a sense of humour. Maybe they both needed to try to lighten up.

  'I have ten experienced detectives working on this case. Your relationship with Mrs Ransome is noted. It is also noted that you claim it is not adulterous, but you believe her husband thinks differently.'

  'He beats her up,' Oliver said.

  The detective wrote this down.

  At nine o'clock the detective said to him, 'Dr Cabot, I don't feel the need to formalise this, but I would appreciate an undertaking from you not to leave the country until our enquiries are completed.'

  'You mean I can't go to my brother's funeral?'

  'I'm sure you'll be able to. I don't imagine his body will be released by the coroner for a few days yet.'

  'I'm intending to accompany the coffin back to the United States.'

  'I understand.'

  'You'll need wild horses to stop me.'

  Ten minutes later, Oliver was in his Jeep. The detective had warned him to be vigilant. If it was he who had been the intended target, not his brother, then he was still at risk.

  Oliver had assured him he would take care, but he didn't think about it as he left the police station. All he could think of was Faith and the troubled feeling he was getting about her. In the car he checked his mobile's answering service and the hotel voice-mail. There were several messages from work on both numbers.

  Nothing from Faith.

  81

  Hugh Caven sat at his desk, shoehorned between two filing cabinets, an ink-jet printer and a colour photocopier, in the global headquarters of Caven Investigation Services, which occupied the confined space of the rear spare room of his home. Home was a small, detached modern box, strewn with toys, in a quiet close in Ickenham, in south-west London. He had a view from his desk down on to the strip of lawn. Sandy was pegging out washing. Sean, his three-year-old son, was playing with a boat in the tiny inflatable paddling-pool.

  Lying on top of the piles of papers covering his desk was a copy of today's Daily Mail. Beneath it were several other newspapers, all of which carried the story that an unnamed man whom police had wanted to interview in connection with the double killing in Notting Hill Gate on Saturday night had died in a fall yesterday.

  Hugh Caven had one friend in the police and this man had just called him back with the information he needed. The police were satisfied that the dead man was the killer of Barry Gatt and Harvey Cabot, and from the evidence he had just heard he could understand why they believed this. But the police had yet to find a motive and were now looking into the dead man's background. They were suspicious that it was a contract killing, but they'd been unable to find any connection so far between Barry Gatt and Cabot. They wouldn't, not from Barry's widow, anyway.

  Barry was a pro. He'd never have told Steph where he was working or whom he was watching. He was also a private man, with a profound sense of decency, and Hugh Caven reckoned he knew exactly why his employee and friend was dead. Barry, watching the television images in Dr Oliver Cabot's flat, had seen Harvey Cabot being shot and had gone to his rescue. Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation… Simple as that.

  Out in the garden Caven saw his son trip on the edge of the pool and fall flat on his face on the lawn. Through the open window he could hear him bawling. He watched his wife put down her laundry, run across to him, scoop him up and comfort him. She was a good mother, a good woman. He was lucky. Five years ago he had been in jail and had had nothing. Now he had a wife he loved, a kid he was proud of and a flourishing business.

  And a close friend dead.

  He could give the police the link they needed. He must do that. All his instincts told him that Ross Ransome was behind this. And in all his life he couldn't recall disliking someone so much as that arrogant man.

  And yet…

  The retainer he'd had from the plastic surgeon had been peanuts. He'd racked up several thousand pounds' worth of expenses in the past two weeks, paying round-the-clock money to his surveillance men, including wages he owed to Barry, plus the equipment he had put into Dr Cabot's flat that he would not now be able to recover.

  He watched Sandy rocking Sean in her arms. She looked so beautiful and he was a lovely kid. You two deserve the best I can give you — but what the hell is that? A father who sacrifices his principles for money? Or a father who risks going back to jail for his principles?

  Hugh Caven had hated every second of his time in jail. There had been a novelty factor during the first few days, but beyond that he'd loathed everything about it: the smell of the place, the corruption of the warders who wanted to sell you drugs and made life extra hard for you if you didn't want to buy them, the loss of privacy. Above all, he had disliked the other inmates. You didn't meet life's winners in jail, you met the losers, spent all your days surrounded by them. Losers like himself, who'd screwed up and were probably destined to go on screwing up.

  Now he was faced with a golden opportunity to screw up again. If he went to the police, Ross Ransome was going to find out and he wouldn't get another penny out of him — which left him about six gr
and out of pocket. Six grand he could not afford to lose. On the other hand, once Ross Ransome had calmed down and thought things through, maybe he would pay a lot more than six grand for him not to go to the police.

  82

  Somewhere beyond the walls of her room, the screaming had been going on all morning. For a while there was a series of low, terrible moans that sounded to Faith as if a man was lying impaled on park railings. Then there were sharp, hysterical screams. It was bugging her.

  But the Big Question was bugging her more.

  It had been bugging her for quite a while, now — she couldn't tell exactly how long because her watch had gone. It had been replaced with a plastic tag, which had her name typed on it: Faith Ransome (Mrs).

  She assumed someone had done this to help her. More useful at this moment to know her name than to tell the time. Everything they did here was helpful — wherever here was.

  One minor problem was that the tag was narrower than her watch-strap. The white mark on her wrist untouched by the burning sun in Thailand showed either side of the tag. She had asked both the Nurse Who Brought Pills and the Nurse Who Removed The Bedpan whether she might have a tag that covered the white, but neither had thought that was going to be possible.

  This wasn't the Big Question that bugged her, though, this was only a small preoccupation, a welcome distraction from the cries of the man impaled on the park railings.

  It was the thing on the back of her hand. She'd seen these dozens of times, in every hospital drama she'd ever watched on television, but she'd never had one herself before.

  Umbilical, she thought. Like being a baby again. Attached to Mother. A tall, silent, metal mother, just a metal rod with a metal arm, and a plastic bag suspended from a hook in the arm, out of which came the umbilical cord, which ran down into a connector that was attached by sticking plaster to the back of her hand.

  What the hell was the word?

  She was having big retrieval problems with her memory. One moment it worried her and the next she was relaxed about it. Cool. 'Actually, I'm really cool about this whole thing,' she said aloud. She found it good to talk in here, helpful to practise her talking: you had to use skills like these. 'Use them or lose them,' she said to no one.

  The man on the railings moaned and for once, she realised, he was agreeing with her.

  She looked around, although there wasn't much to see, nothing that she hadn't already seen several times. Bare walls painted white — a nice white, the kind of white you could go on looking at, on to which you could project your thoughts, a real cinema-screen white. She'd already watched her thoughts up there several times. Now it was the intermission.

  There were no pictures in this room and the only window was a kind of frosted skylight in the high ceiling above her through which diffused white daylight came. It might be a grey day or a fine day, impossible to tell through that glass. It did not matter.

  There was no curtain either.

  She noticed that more as an observation than a concern. Nothing concerned her right now: she felt as she had felt years ago when she was larking around with girlfriends, a little drunk, and that was fine. Hard to focus on anything for more than a few moments, but, hey, who needed to?

  There was a lot all boxed up inside her head that she needed to deal with, different boxes, an Alec box, a Lendt's disease box, an Oliver Cabot box, but there just wasn't time. The day seemed to be divided not into hours or minutes but into visits. The Pill Nurse visits. The Food Nurse visits. The Nurse Who Came With The Resident Doctor visits. The Others Who Asked Her Questions visits. The Dr David DeWitt visits. The Ross visits. A lot of Ross visits.

  They were all so friendly to her, probably because Ross was a medic, she assumed. The medical profession looking after its own.

  The Pill Nurse was coming into the room now. Dark hair and breezy voice. 'And how are we?'

  'Fantastic!'

  The nurse frowned and Faith wondered why. Then she was holding the tiny paper cup of water to Faith's lips. She sipped. It was too much of an effort to hold the cup herself and, besides, her body was so heavy, it felt as though lead was running in her veins, not blood. It was so easy just to lie motionless, like a tree, everything done for her. Two capsules shaken out of a tiny container and popped into her mouth, one at a time.

  'There! Not so bad, are they?'

  Faith swallowed. Talking was a big effort, but she needed to talk, needed the answer to the question that had been bugging her. The answer to the Big Question.

  'This thing,' she said, her voice slurred. 'What'd they call th's thing?'

  'The cannula? On your arm? The cannula that the drip line goes in?'

  'Drip line!' Faith said, so pleased she repeated it. 'Drip line!'

  'Intravenous drip,' the nurse added, helpfully. 'It's just a saline solution, salt and water. Your husband was worried that you'd become very dehydrated.'

  Ross was coming into the room now.

  'She's just had her lunchtime pills,' the nurse said to him.

  'Good. How is she?'

  'She's fine, stable, seems quite settled.'

  Hey, I'm a person, I'm not furniture, you can talk to me! Faith nearly said, but she didn't want to sound rude. Anyhow, it didn't matter.

  'I'll leave you alone with your husband,' the Pill Nurse said.

  Ross kissed Faith's forehead. 'How are you, my darling?' he asked, so gently.

  'I'm really having nice time,' she said.

  She saw his eyes glance up.

  'Drip line,' she said. 'Umbilical.'

  Ross peered hard at her eyes, then went to the door, which was open,

  'Don' — go — go — yet,' she said.

  He closed the door, then walked back across the room, behind the bed, out of her line of sight. A shadow moved across her face and she looked up. The drip bag was moving. He was doing something to it. Disconnecting it.

  A tiny swell of concern washed through her. 'What doing?'

  'Checking,' he said. 'I want to make sure my darling has exactly the right amount — I don't want them being stingy with your supply.'

  Now he was sitting in the chair beside the bed. Something wrong with his jacket, she thought. There was a bulge in one pocket. Had he taken the…?

  She looked up. The drip bag was there, the solution filling the tube, the line, the umbilical. He was just looking after her. Being a good husband.

  Now he was standing at the sink. She heard running water. He was putting something in his pocket.

  'I'm due in theatre in half an hour. I'll come by this evening,' he said, and kissed her. 'I love you, Faith.'

  'I love you too,' she said.

  The door clicked.

  She looked up again at the drip bag. It was so good lying here, feeling so happy, so loved. She glanced away, but instantly her eyes were drawn back to the bag. Umbilical, she thought.

  Mother.

  A connection, a poor connection, a few crackly sparks, that was all. There was some kind of a link. The drip bag. Her mother.

  Being here.

  But now she was too tired to try to work it out. Her eyes closed then opened again. Christ, it was happening. The walls of the room seemed to inch in towards her, then move away. Panicking she could feel perspiration running down her face, down her neck.

  'Help me,' she said. 'Please help me, it's happening —'

  Dying again. They had come for her soul. She was outside her body now, looking down at it lying in the bed, eyes wide open, lips moving, crying out, 'Help me, please help me.'

  Oh, Christ, she really was dying this time. Dying, leaving Alec behind, and Oliver Cabot. Where was Oliver? Why hadn't he —

  Now the door was opening. A nurse was coming in with a man in a white coat, and she had seen the man before, a doctor. He leaned over, looked at her face, shone a torch into her eyes, checked her pulse.

  She heard him say, 'She's had these before?'

  'Twice,' the nurse said. 'It's a symptom of the disease.'

&
nbsp; 'Yes,' he said, with the calm authority of an expert.

  'Please get me back into my body,' Faith said. 'I must see my son before I die completely — before I go and don't come back.'

  The man's voice replied, 'What you're having is just like a little panic attack, Faith. You're going to be fine. You've been a bit of a naughty girl not taking your pills, haven't you? That's why you're having these attacks. I'm sure within a few months we'll have you much better.'

  83

  In his office at the Cabot Centre, Oliver punched up the 141 code to mask the identity of his phone, then dialled Faith's home number. Four rings then the sound of Ross Ransome's voice telling him no one was at home.

  He dropped the phone back on the cradle.

  What have you done with her, you sick punk? Have you killed her? You screwed up killing me and now you've killed her instead?

  His next patient was downstairs in the waiting room, and he was already twenty minutes late for her appointment. It had been a mistake coming to work today. He'd thought it might distract him, take him away from the hotel room where he'd been incarcerated all day yesterday, waiting for the call from Faith that never came.

  Was it because they had slept together? Had she gone home and found it too heavy a trip? Decided to bail out and go back to her marriage? After all she had said to him?

  Oliver didn't think so, yet he knew from experience that it was hard to read people and even harder to predict their actions.

  But not Faith, he thought, she wouldn't do that, it wasn't in her nature. She had a fundamental decency. If she had gone home and changed her mind, or changed it after they'd spoken in that brief call on Tuesday, she would have told him.

  But what other explanation could there be? Her mobile phones rang and his calls got straight through to the voice-mail. No one answered at her home. They had agreed to talk at seven on Tuesday. A definite arrangement, not an if or a maybe. Faith had said she would call him but she had not.