Faith

by Peter James

  He scooped him into his arms and swung him up on to his back. He told Alec to hold on tight.

  Then he climbed out on to the roof. There was a ferocious crackle in the air and a choking smell of burning paint. All around him sparks and smouldering embers floated in the air like spent fireworks. He inched his way down until his feet reached the guttering. Miraculously, the one part of the house that wasn't burning was directly beneath him.

  A police car was parked just short of the cattle grid. He could see Faith slumped in the front passenger seat. No sign of Ross.

  'Hey!' he yelled. 'Hey! Help! Help!'

  Seconds later a beam was shining in his face. Then he saw two police officers below him.

  Oliver yelled, 'There's a ladder, but we don't have time to get it. One of you hold the drainpipe, the other get on his shoulders and I'll pass the kid —'

  His voice was drowned in a massive roar, as if he was standing on an erupting volcano. The roof was moving. The house was collapsing. Both officers looked up in horror and stepped back. One cupped his hands and yelled, 'Jump!'

  In sheer panic, Oliver lobbed Alec, like some giant rugby ball, straight at them, then leaped as far out into the darkness as he could.

  107

  Sean was restless at breakfast. Hugh Caven couldn't work out whether his son was looking forward to starting playgroup again today or not. Every time he asked him, all he got was a silent shrug. It was the first day of the winter term, although ironically it seemed that summer had finally arrived in England: a real Indian summer, the temperatures well up in the eighties, far higher than normal for the first week in September.

  The private investigator was also restless. Among the envelopes in the morning post he'd scooped from the letterbox was one he didn't like the look of: a buff, letter-sized envelope with a police crest on the outside.

  He didn't know what it contained, but there were several possibilities and none of them good. It might be notification of a traffic violation — maybe he'd gone through a speed camera, or had been photographed jumping a traffic light, or perhaps his tax disc was out of date.

  More worryingly, a couple of weeks ago he'd been grilled by a policeman after being observed snooping round the back of a house, when he'd been trying to photograph a couple having an affair. Could be something to do with that. Or there was still a possibility it was to do with the bugging of Dr Oliver Cabot's flat.

  He remembered back in June when he'd finally taken the plunge and phoned Detective Sergeant Anson, now promoted to Detective Inspector, quite how cool his reception had been. It had seemed to him then that the policeman was more interested in the fact that he had illegally entered Cabot's flat than in his information that Ross Ransome might be linked to the murders of Barry Gatt and Harvey Cabot. He had dutifully taken down the compass co-ordinates and the address in Gloucestershire where Caven told him he thought Ransome was going, and where he had warned Anson that there might be an ugly scene, but he had taken them down only under duress and had not sounded convinced.

  As soon as Sandy had driven away with Sean, Caven took the post upstairs to his office, lit his first cigarette of the day and ripped open the buff envelope.

  Police Headquarters, Notting Hill Police Station,

  101 Ladbroke Grove, London, W11 3PL

  Mr Hugh Caven

  Caven Investigative Service

  5 Claremont Close

  Ickenham

  K12 7BD

  5 September 1999

  Dear Mr Caven,

  Reference: 37 Ladbroke Avenue, London.

  I am writing with respect to your activities in unlawfully entering the premises of Dr Oliver Cabot at 37 Ladbroke Avenue in June of this year, and further, in placing illegal surveillance devices in these premises.

  Having given careful consideration to all the circumstances, I have decided to take no further action on this matter. However, I must warn you formally that any recurrence of offences of this nature in the future will be viewed very seriously by the police, particularly in light of your previous record, and you may be liable for prosecution.

  Yours sincerely,

  Detective Inspector D. G. Anson

  Senior Investigating Officer

  Nine months later, Hugh Caven received a second letter from the same police officer.

  Notting Hill Police Station,

  101 Ladbroke Grove, London, W11 3PL

  Mr Hugh Caven

  Caven Investigative Service

  5 Claremont Close

  Ickenam

  IK12 7BD

  8 June 2000

  Dear Mr Caven,

  I have the pleasant duty of informing you that a reward was offered in June of last year for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of the killer or killers of Professor Harvey Cabot. The award was sponsored by the late Professor Cabot's brother, Dr Oliver Cabot.

  Our investigations have led us to conclude to our satisfaction that the prime suspect, who was responsible also for the unlawful killing of Mr Barry Gatt, is now deceased. These same investigations, partly as a result of information supplied by yourself, have resulted in the issuing of a warrant for the arrest of Mr Ross Ransome, of Little Scaynes Manor, Little Scaynes, West Sussex, on a charge of conspiracy to murder.

  As Mr Ransome's medical condition is such that it has as yet not been possible to serve any warrant, and nor does it seem likely he will ever be in a fit state of health to attend trial, I am instructed by Dr Oliver Cabot to inform you that he would like to make you an ex gratia payment of £10,000 (ten thousand pounds sterling) as a token of his gratitude for your contribution.

  If you are willing to accept this award, kindly contact the undersigned at your convenience.

  Yours sincerely,

  Detective Inspector D. G. Anson

  Senior Investigating Officer

  The cheque arrived ten days later. Hugh Caven paid it in at his bank, without telling his wife about it. Times were still hard, and he knew exactly what she would say, with a five-year-old son and a seven-month-old daughter to feed. He wasn't intending to give her the chance.

  He allowed five days for the cheque to clear, then went to the bank and drew out the entire amount in cash.

  Late that same night, he drove to the street where Barry Gatt's widow lived with her triplets who were now two years old. He parked a safe distance away, so that he wouldn't be spotted if she looked out of a window. He was relieved to see that no lights were on in her little house.

  He pushed the cash through the letterbox in a bag, then returned to his car.

  As he headed home, he kept the radio switched off, preferring to listen to the music playing inside his head. It was an old Bob Dylan song, and as he drove, singing the words with the window open and the air blasting his face, a weight lifted from his heart and began blowing in the wind.

  108

  In the small room annexed to the low-dependency ward in the burns unit of East Grinstead hospital, Faith glanced at the nurse, then back at the figure in the bed. When she had first come in, she had found it hard to look at him.

  From the skewed parting of the scaly purple mass of scar tissue between the remnants of his nose and his chin came a long, low moan. Then once more the sucking, watery sound of a breath in, followed by the long, slow rasping as he exhaled.

  He lay on his back with his arms raised, fists clenched like a boxer. To a stranger it might appear that this was some bizarre act of defiance against his condition, but Faith had been told by the nurse at the plastic-surgery unit of this hospital, where he used to operate himself one day a week, that this was not so. It was a phenomenon in severe burns victims known as the pugilistic attitude, where the limbs remained permanently flexed due to the shortening of the flexor muscles caused by shrinkage of the skin and the muscle tissue from the heat.

  The pugilistic attitude was more usually seen in dead bodies recovered from fires, and it was unusual in a victim still living. But Ross Ransome was a rare case, and
the sheer strength of his will to live had amazed everyone. Few people, other than young children, survived sixty per cent burns. Yet two years on, Ross was still alive after suffering almost seventy per cent burns. If, as Faith thought, this could be called living.

  Life-support had been switched off with her consent as next-of-kin, three months after that June day when he had been transferred here from Cheltenham, suffering second- and third-degree burns. The skin across almost all of his torso, arms, legs and head had fibrosed into scar tissue, and he had sustained severe damage to his internal passages, airways and organs, in particular the kidneys and, by far the most serious, his brain. His hair had gone, as had his vision, but EEG tests showed that he still retained some hearing.

  Ironically, instead of weakening and gradually slipping away, as the medics had hoped, his pulse seemed, month by month, to be getting a little stronger. No one knew, with the condition of his brain, whether he was capable of feeling pain, but every few hours he released a moan, and for this reason he was kept on a constant morphine drip.

  Patches of his body were covered in bandages. For the past two years he had undergone an endless series of grafts, as his former colleagues fought a constant battle against areas of his skin dying because of his damaged circulation.

  Faith wasn't sure why she had come. The hospital said he had been calling her name as if he had something he urgently needed to say, but the thought of seeing him had scared her. He still wielded power over her, the power to come to her in her dreams and frighten her, to overshadow her waking thoughts.

  And she had seen the evidence that had been amassed against him on some of his patients, although it didn't appear likely he would ever be brought to trial. She slept badly most nights, lying in bed, thinking, unravelling those years of her marriage to him, looking for the signs and clues pointing to the monster she had missed. The only thought that appeased her conscience was, as Oliver reminded her repeatedly of the words of Soren Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.

  Standing as far away from him as the small room allowed, she watched him warily, glad of the company of the nurse, scared that somehow, even in this state, he could reach out and harm her. It seemed to Faith that he was aware of her presence and desperate to speak.

  One of the hardest things to bear had been Alec's persistent questions about his father, but they were becoming less frequent. She'd decided from the start to stick as close to the truth as she could. She told him his daddy had been badly injured and was in hospital a long way away, and did not want Alec to see him until he got better. Oliver was good with him and Alec was clearly fond of him, but there were still times when she could see sadness on his face as he drifted into some space of his own inside his head.

  The words came out suddenly, sharp and clear. As clear as if the past two years had been sloughed off and they were back at Little Scaynes Manor together in the library, the drawing room or the kitchen, chatting.

  'How's Alec?'

  Then silence.

  Faith stared at the nurse, wondering if she had imagined it, but she could see that the nurse had heard him too.

  In a trembling voice, Faith said, 'He's fine.'

  There was no response, just the ragged sounds of his breathing.

  She waited a full minute, maybe longer and then, she couldn't help it, tears welled in her eyes. 'He's just had his eighth birthday party,' she said. 'We had a bouncy castle, a conjuror and a barbecue.'

  She glanced at the nurse, who encouraged her with a nod to continue. 'He — he liked it best when we turned off the air pump for a few seconds, and the castle started to deflate. And he scored thirty runs in cricket at school last week. He's going to be a good sportsman, just like his dad. He's shooting up now too. He's going to be tall and strong, like you.'

  She dug into her handbag, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. 'And do you know what he said the other day? He told me he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He said he's going to be a plastic surgeon, just like you. He wants to fix that bump on my nose — the one I got after you biffed me in the face to stop me running into the burning house to try to get him. You broke it — that's ironic after all the surgery you did on me, isn't it?'

  Her voice was faltering. Then she gave a little laugh. 'I told him he'll be needing to do more than just rhinoplasty on me by the time he's qualified. I think all that great work you did on me will be in need of top-up maintenance in thirty years' time.'

  The tears were flooding down her face now. She turned away, racked with emotion, walked out of the door and quickly down the corridor.

  Epilogue

  Three months later, on a fine autumnal morning, in the middle of breakfast, Faith received a phone call from the hospital, telling her that Ross had died during the night. The duty houseman said he hadn't thought there was any point in waking her at four in the morning.

  She thanked him and hung up, unsure how she felt. Relief, certainly, but it was more complicated than that. She was still technically his wife, which meant, she remembered from her father's death, that she would have to register the death and organise the funeral.

  She wished Oliver was here to put an arm around her and give her a hug. He would understand the jumble of emotions inside her; he seemed to understand so much about people, about life.

  Heavy-hearted, she sat down at the kitchen table of the house Oliver had bought near Hampstead Heath, and watched Alec munching his cereal. Rasputin sat as usual by his feet, ever hopeful that a stray cluster of granola might full his way. He was usually lucky: Alec was a messy eater.

  Both she and Ross had been living on borrowed time. In a way, all of them were, Alec, her mother and Oliver included. All of life was borrowed time, really.

  She remembered, a long time ago, walking through a graveyard in North London with Oliver, and she could recall vividly something he had said as he had looked at a gravestone.

  'You know what fascinates me? It's the dash. That little mark between the dates. I look down at someone's grave, and I think, That dash represents a human being's entire life. You and I are living out our dashes right now. It's not important when someone was born or when they died, what matters is what they did in between with their lives.'

  He had gone on to talk about a temple that existed in another dimension, a temple that humans could only enter after they had died. In this temple were stored the Akashic Records, which comprise the history of each soul.

  She wondered if that was where Ross had gone now. If he was in that temple, thumbing through the pages, trying to find that point where everything in his life had changed, that one moment where maybe the paths had forked and that something — no one would ever know what — had got into his mind, and he'd gone from being a good man to a bad one.

  Something positive to have come out of the horror was that her mother and she had bonded. Their relationship was far stronger and closer now than it had ever been. To her delight — and amazement — Margaret, who had developed osteoarthritis, had become a regular patient of the Cabot Centre, going there weekly for acupuncture, aromatherapy and Reiki, and, even more to Faith's surprise, had accepted a course of homeopathic remedies from Oliver for a cold.

  It was two years and four months since her first diagnosis of Lendt's disease. The check-ups were down to every three months now. The last two had been clear. There were people who went into remission then had the disease return and wipe them out, but two years was pretty much the outer limit.

  Medicine was an inexact science as all the pages of information on Lendt's disease on the Internet showed: arguments for and against the new Moliou-Orelan wonder-drug, Entexamin; arguments for and against all kinds of natural remedies. She had no way of telling whether the route she had chosen with Oliver Cabot was the right one to beat the disease, but every time she questioned it in her mind, she remembered a conversation she'd had right at the start of her treatment from him.

  'At this clinic we're not ag
ainst science, Faith, anything but. Science is just a method of getting at the truth, and we no more believe that the extract of the antennae of some Amazonian ant will cure arthritis than the regular medical profession does, until it is properly tested. But we also know that we're treating people not cars. And people get better because they want to get better. We know from a number of well-run studies that there is an intimate connection between the mind and body. If we make the mind feel good, with massage, good music, pure, natural foods and, of course, love, the body will have a much better chance of healing.'

  'Is that what you want to do to me, Dr Cabot, cure me with love?' she had asked.

  'Mummy, we're going to be late for school.'

  Faith looked up and stared at her son through a mist of tears.

  'Why are you crying?' he asked. 'Are you sad?'

  She nodded. 'Mummy's sad this morning. She's very, very sad. But she's also happy.'

  'You can't be happy and sad at the same time.'

  'You can,' she said, dabbing her eyes with a napkin. 'It's a secret they don't teach you at school.'

  She stood up. 'Come on, get your bag and your coat. You're right — you are going to be late.'

  Rasputin started barking.

  'What else don't they teach you at school, Mummy?'

  She grabbed the keys off the hook on the dresser, gave the dog a biscuit to keep him quiet, got Alec's coat on him and his bag over his shoulder, then scooped her son out of the door.

  In the car he repeated the question.

  She didn't reply. The journey was too short and the answer too long.