The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  Quietly, Sydney said, ‘I saw you were late again today.’

  Juliet lowered her own voice in reply. She did not want the other staff members in the lounge to overhear what she had to say. She said, ‘I slept through my alarm. I never oversleep and you’re right, it’s happened twice in two days.’

  Sydney smiled. She cocked her head, amused and said, ‘So what’s going on? You been out late?’

  ‘I’ve been seeing Jack.’

  ‘Oh, no. Jules …’

  ‘We’re taking it slowly. It’s going really well.’

  ‘What about the cute guy at the exhibition? The guy from your building?’

  ‘Max. Yeah. Didn’t work out. Was never going to.’

  ‘I hope he’s a good loser,’ Sydney said.

  Juliet shrugged. ‘Everything is going really well,’ she said. ‘Or everything would be, if it wasn’t for this weird sleep disorder thing.’

  ‘Disorder, babe, is when you don’t sleep.’

  ‘I do,’ Juliet said. ‘Like a log.’

  ‘So buy a louder alarm,’ Sydney replied. She gave Juliet’s arm a consolatory squeeze and stood and walked away.

  Juliet considered it all. Her mind had cleared, but there were no answers coming into focus. The clarity only brought the questions into greater and more urgent relief. The only thing she was certain of was that for Sydney to comment on her erratic time-keeping made it a general talking point among the entire department. She really would have to find a way to put a stop to it just as soon as she possibly could.

  Juliet had little appetite for lunch. The sun was shining after the heavy rain of the previous day and the air had a crisp cleanliness to it she thought might help clear the remaining clouds from her head. So instead of eating in the canteen, she bought a sandwich and sat outside, in the ivy-clad quadrangle that offered a bit of quiet and seclusion behind the hospital’s X-ray department.

  She unwrapped and ate her sandwich very deliberately. She knew it was tuna and mayo because that was what the label said. She knew it contained slices of cucumber because they were freshly cut and crunched audibly between her teeth. She could not really taste anything yet, she realised. But for the texture of what she chewed, she could have been eating cardboard.

  When her cell phone started to vibrate in her pocket, she assumed it was Jack. But it was Holstrom. She frowned. Her last conversation with her boss had been a bleak one. She did not want to hear that the boy she had used all her powers to save had strung himself up or opened his wrists in his cell. The tone of his letter had told her Carlos might well be a strong candidate for a suicide attempt. It would not be an attention-seeking cry for help; it would be the real deal with him.

  But Holstrom wasn’t calling about Carlos at all.

  ‘I am looking at the admissions list for last night,’ Holstrom said. ‘Am I right in thinking your estranged husband is Jack Devereau, the author?’

  Fear clutched at Juliet. Suddenly she did not feel quite so wrapped in cotton wool. She could taste the residue of fish and sunflower oil in a slick coating over her teeth. She was aware of the strength of the autumn sun, warming her scalp under her hair. She must have moved on hearing Jack’s name, because a pigeon stabbing at the sandwich crumbs between her feet was startled by the reflex and took flight.

  ‘He is. Why do you ask?’

  ‘He was admitted to the hospital last night. Apparently he was pushed down a flight of subway steps. He suffered heavy bruising to his coccyx and his sternum and his head was cut. His right knee was badly jarred, exacerbating an old high-school football injury. He walked out of here, apparently. Though I suspect it was more of a limp. He will live, Juliet, but he was pretty badly bashed up. He did not recognise his attacker. The police are treating it as a random incident of unprovoked violence.’

  ‘It must have been random,’ Juliet said. ‘Jack hasn’t an enemy in the world. Well, aside from the odd book critic.’

  ‘Critics don’t push authors down flights of steps.’

  ‘No,’ Juliet conceded. ‘They don’t.’

  But she ended the call uneasily. There was a chill creeping through her, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and the gooseflesh rise on her arms. She had never been a great believer in coincidence. Things were stacking up. There was no defining pattern yet, but things were definitely out of whack.

  Thirty-seven

  JACK WALKED GINGERLY towards Juliet’s apartment building. Max watched his progress from nine floors above. He felt fairly satisfied at the damage he had inflicted on the man. Even from the angle and distance from which he watched, Jack’s gait was laboured, handicapped by a brown grocery bag that looked full and heavy. He must have shopped locally, Max thought, or he would have taken a cab in his condition, hampered by his injuries and burdened by the weight of a bag. He was too far away for Max to be able to make out details but he expected that pain, and possibly the drugs prescribed to ease it, would make the man dazed-looking and pale.

  Jack was now at the door of the apartment building. Max watched him grimace and juggle with his cell phone. He did not put it to his ear. He was sending someone a text message and Max didn’t need to be a genius to guess who that someone was. Max watched Jack slip the phone back into his coat pocket. Then the acuteness of the angle put him out of sight as he approached the building’s door.

  Max was standing in Juliet’s darkened bathroom, holding one of her dresses, stroking the silky smooth fabric, speculating on what kind of occasion she would wear it, how she would accessorise it, whether she would ever wear it out with him, when he heard Jack come in.

  Max’s immediate thought was one of incredulity. He could not believe that Juliet had taken the insolent liberty of giving this stranger a key. Max was the one who determined who should come and go freely in his building. It was not something Juliet should have taken it upon herself to do without consulting him. The guy was strolling along the hallway towards the kitchen as though he was here by right; as though he owned the place. Despite his limp he was almost swaggering. To the crackle and staccato thumps of groceries being unpacked, Max hid behind the bathroom door and waited. The dress he had been stroking hung forgotten from one tightly clenched fist.

  Jack stood right next to the newly refurbished wine alcove. Its door was wide open. He had brought with him two bottles of wine. One was a nice Chilean Merlot, a decent wine, but nothing special. The other bottle, however, was a very special wine indeed. It was a ’64 Château Margaux he had bought in the hope of opening in celebration. Maybe not this evening, but soon, when he put the vital question and Juliet agreed that they should move back in together.

  He opened the Merlot and left it on the counter to let it breathe. The Margaux, he decided, he would store in the appropriate place. So he entered the wine closet looking for a rack, hoping his prized bottle would not lie there for long enough to gather a patina of dust. He switched on the light. And that was when he noticed that the back wall of the wine closet was cracked.

  The crack was not natural. Panelling fissured along the grain of the wood from which it was made. This crack was a straight vertical line, like something deliberately and very neatly contrived. He walked towards the closet’s rear wall and looked at it more closely. Then he pushed at the crack experimentally, and it swung back on concealed hinges, revealing a labyrinthine space. He could see plaster rough over brickwork and rodent droppings on a stone floor.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Jack said out loud, momentarily stunned. He had never seen anything like this in his life. There was something profoundly clandestine and also unmistakably menacing about what he was looking at. He could think of no purpose for it that was not sinister. He was damn sure about one thing: Juliet knew nothing about it.

  He pushed the door back fully and put his head into the space and peered around. It was a secret passage. It extended into the gloom to left and right of where he stood and at intervals was suffused by feeble patches of light. He walked fully into t
he passage. It was high enough for him to stand in.

  ‘Shit,’ he said to himself.

  His instinct was to get out of the apartment. He knew that the mind responsible for this perverse secret architecture could only be as dark and foreboding as the passages it had fashioned. He wanted to escape because he thought that his discovery was very dangerous. But he also wanted to warn Juliet. She must never return. His instincts told him that she wasn’t safe here. No one was safe here. Anyone who entered this apartment was merely prey to whatever creature lurked in these corridors.

  Several details that had failed to trouble him individually now began to stack up for Jack and form a disturbing pattern.

  The rent charged for this place wasn’t just competitive. For the location and dimensions of the apartment, the rent was absurdly low. No realtor had been involved in brokering the tenancy. Juliet had told him that the owner of the building had recently died. Just as she had told him that the references she had supplied had never been checked.

  There was Amelie’s skittish behaviour on the evening of his dinner here. The dog had been nervous when she should have been overjoyed at being reunited with Juliet. And Jack had felt himself a strange sense of being observed; it had seemed to him as though the two of them were somehow on display.

  He had wondered if the creepy old guy Juliet had told him about, the dead guy whose table they ate from, was haunting the place and watching them. He’d mentioned what he’d sensed to her only very reluctantly and because he thought she might be somehow threatened by it.

  He turned from the kitchen into the hallway and stopped dead in his tracks. Looming before him with a grinning, fixed stare was the guy with the glasses.

  Jack saw him tense and recognised the spasmodic swiftness of the movement and the hatred and fear that prompted it and he knew with cold certainty that this was the man who had pushed him down the subway steps. The hooded top had obscured his features when he’d done that. But there was something singular and unmistakable about the way the fellow moved: quick and somehow furtive at the same time.

  Max took a step towards him. Jack knew that he was going to have to fight to get out of Juliet’s apartment. He knew about the fight or flight response to the impending threat of physical confrontation and flight was not an option here; not unless he found a way of descending nine flights safely from out of one of the apartment windows.

  A fight with Max was not an enticing prospect. He looked strong and though he did not look sane, he looked focused and determined. Jack wasn’t afraid of him though. He was furious on his own behalf at the unprovoked subway assault, and utterly disgusted at what that skulking labyrinth he had chanced upon had done to breach Juliet’s privacy.

  ‘You have no right to be here,’ Max said.

  ‘You’ve no business talking about rights,’ Jack said. ‘What are you, some kind of Peeping Tom? Some kind of fucking pervert?’

  Max winced slightly at that. There was truculence in his tone when he said, ‘You never deserved her.’

  ‘What?’ Jack said. ‘Get out of my fucking way, you creep. Back off, or I’ll hurt you with a smile on my face.’

  But Max was the only one of the two of them who smiled.

  Thirty-eight

  JULIET’S CELL PHONE rang and she saw that someone had sent her a text message she had not yet read. She answered the call and recognised the lab technician’s voice as the woman said, ‘Doctor Devereau?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I faxed the toxicology report you ordered.’

  Juliet stepped into her ER station and grabbed the fax from the machine. She read it with a dawning sense of horror. The list of medications that had been identified from her blood and urine read like a lexicon of sedatives and sleeping draughts. The words Vicodin, Valium and Demarol were irrefutable in black capitals on the one-page report.

  She opened her unread text. It was from Jack. It had been sent half an hour earlier and said, Dinner at your place, 7pm, don’t be late! x

  Five minutes later she was in the street making for home, still in her scrubs, her cell phone at her ear, silently imploring Jack to pick up. He didn’t. She left a message. ‘Jack,’ she warned, ‘don’t go into my apartment. I don’t know how the fuck it happened, but somehow …’

  The call dropped with a series of beeps.

  ‘Fuck.’ She did not bother to call back. She just ran down the street at greater speed. She wasn’t dressed for running but she’d never run faster or more urgently in her entire life.

  I don’t know how the fuck it happened but I’ve been taking a cocktail of drugs in the evening. It’s madness. But there’s method in the madness because the drugs all have complementary and overlapping effects. They all do the same basic job on the human body and mind. Their aim is temporary oblivion and they make me wonder just how much they’ve made me oblivious to.

  I’ve been the victim of a violation. I’ve been the victim of a planned crime, carefully carried out. Every premeditated crime shares two characteristics: opportunity and motive.

  Opportunity was an easy one, but motive? Oh, Jesus, she thought. She would have closed her eyes, had she not been running down the street at full speed. It hardly bore thinking about. Neither did the jeopardy Jack might have placed himself in with his chivalrous gesture of cooking her dinner.

  She rode the elevator to the ninth floor and fumbled in her pocket for her keys. She paused for just a half-beat as she passed Max’s door. When she reached her own, ominously it was already open. She had to gather her courage before she found the will to enter her own home.

  ‘Jack?’ she called.

  Nothing.

  She moved through the living room, towards the kitchen where she saw the bag of groceries that Jack had brought. It was only half emptied, there were still items on the counter. It was entirely out of character for him to have left things like that. He would not have left vegetables that needed chilling to wilt. He was, by habit, punctiliously neat.

  With an effort that was almost palpable, she went through the rest of the apartment, looking for something unusual or anomalous, but there was nothing she could identify as out of place or strange.

  Except when she returned to the living room. There, she noticed a red blinking light on the screen of the surveillance system. It was the signal to indicate that something had been recorded. It meant that there had been movement in her apartment while she had been absent from it.

  She hit the playback button. She saw Jack enter the apartment with his grocery bag, his gait slightly stiffer than usual, as though he was nursing sore muscles after a really strenuous workout. He disappeared into the kitchen, but that was the last thing recorded.

  There was no record of him leaving the kitchen. And the kitchen wasn’t covered by the cameras. But there was no record of him leaving the apartment, which, since he wasn’t there, there should have been.

  Juliet was dwelling on this mystery when she saw that the surveillance system’s screen listed another recorded incident. The time of the recording was 2.31 a.m. the previous night. It meant that someone or something had been moving around her apartment as she slept.

  Her finger paused over the playback button. She felt almost sick with foreboding at what it might reveal. For a moment, she was too afraid of what had been filmed to press the button and view it. She knew, though, that she had to. She took a deep breath and pressed the button and the screen flickered revealing the security camera view from the living-room feed.

  The screen showed the living room and in the upper left-hand corner, the entrance to the bedroom. Playback jumped ahead of time to find a moment of movement in the room. In jerking, time-cut style editing, Juliet watched the image of herself from the night before as she walked back to the bedroom. She saw that the time at which she did so, was 23.05 p.m.

  The recording stopped. Then it jumped forward in time again. It showed 1.05 in the morning. Almost two hours after she had turned in, something shifted in her apartment. She though
t she sensed movement, on the edge of the frame, near the front door? Maybe it was actually near the kitchen.

  A figure abruptly stepped into the frame. Juliet gasped in fear and physically recoiled, forced back by the sheer shock of what she was witnessing. Deducing something from an item of technology was not the same as seeing an intruder, looming on the screen in the early hours of the night in her private space.

  The figure was facing away from the camera. Who was it? Would she recognise him? Motive, she thought. Opportunity. In excruciating slow motion, as if somehow sensing the hidden scrutiny of the lens focused on him, or at least wary and suspicious, the figure turned. And Juliet felt dread shudder through her as she recognised Max. She expelled a pained whimper. The figure on the screen paused. And then he passed into her bedroom and out of the reach and sight of the camera lens.

  The screen went to static and then to black. And then the time code showed 1.55 a.m. and Max slipped like a burly phantom out of her room and across the screen before disappearing once more from view. The screen went black again. And then it came on, showing daylight, a frantic Juliet rushing, late for work at the edge of the frame and the time code spelled out 10.03.

  He had been in her room for forty-five minutes while she had been oblivious to his presence. He had contrived that, hadn’t he? To what end had he drugged her so comprehensively? She thought that she probably knew the answer to the question, grotesque as the answer would be. She wondered did she have the strength to find out, conclusively. She was shaking, on the verge of hyperventilating, and only her medical training and a supreme self-discipline was preventing that from happening now. At the edge of hysteria, with hands made clumsy and disobedient by dread and panic, Juliet grasped the remote and changed the feed on the monitor to the bedroom camera.