The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  She had won, but she felt no triumph. She had killed, but she felt no remorse. She had done only what she had needed to in order to survive an assault she had done nothing to provoke or justify. And she would have saved her attacker had it been within her power to do so.

  She stifled a sob. She could not lose her composure now. She needed to find her cell phone and try to get a signal from it and call the police. She was still trapped in this bleak and alien place and they would liberate her from it and she would have her various wounds cleaned and dressed and the long journey to normality would begin.

  There were practicalities to accomplish before she could allow herself to grieve for Jack. She had lost him. She was alone in the world again and soon, if she was not strong and determined, loss and grief would seem all the world had to offer her.

  Forty-four

  HOLSTROM SUGGESTED A three-month leave of absence from the hospital. She considered the offer compassionate and generous, characteristic of the man who had made it. But it was the last thing she actually needed.

  ‘Grief needs to be confronted, not suppressed,’ he said.

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘The ER is not a place for coming to terms with the loss of someone you loved.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘Knowing and believing are not quite the same thing.’

  ‘Work is therapeutic. I really do not want to have the time to dwell on what has happened.’

  ‘You must take a break, Juliet. I insist upon it.’

  They compromised on six weeks. The problem for Juliet was that it was her job that defined her. It was who she was. That was even more the case in the permanent absence of Jack from her life. Without the routine of work she barely knew who it was she was supposed to be.

  Her physical injuries healed rapidly. Her nose was badly bruised rather than broken. Her damaged eye had suffered no permanent loss of vision. The gash on her cheek was deep and clean and was so skilfully sutured that she was told it would not leave a permanent scar. It had seemed strange to be treated as a patient at the hospital. It made her touchingly aware of how genuinely her colleagues actually cared for her.

  She did not sign up for trauma counselling. She couldn’t bear to talk about what had been done to her, couldn’t stand to replay those last awful moments of Max’s life, nor bring herself to think about Jack’s. The images of Max bending over her, violating her, and the feel of the nails pumping into his chest were replayed endlessly when she tried to sleep. But it was the memory of the weight of Jack’s dead body as it dropped onto her that made her wake, screaming, in the night.

  Jack had died by strangulation. He had fought desperately hard to overcome his attacker, the pathologist said, despite the damage that had been inflicted when he was pushed down the steps of the subway station. The hospital had missed a fractured rib in the list of injuries from that earlier attack.

  It must have made walking painful, with his burden of a full grocery bag. Even breathing normally would have been uncomfortable. But he had wanted more than anything to try to win her back and so he had ignored his own pain and discomfort to come over and cook her a meal. It had been a last, fatal gesture of the gallantry and love which had won her heart in the first place.

  Jack had fought hard but Max had been stronger and had been armed with the ligature he carried in his pocket. It was a yard-long length of electrical cable tied between two clothes pegs, a makeshift garrotte, the weapon favoured by the Brooklyn killer Giuseppe Forno all those years ago. The police said he had probably improvised it on seeing his victim enter the building. Max was not a prolific killer, but he had shown a talent for it.

  Max’s death had given her as much closure as she could ever hope to have, and the rest she would deal with in her own way. It was a relief to discover that Max had not given her an STD, nor had he left her pregnant. Though by the time this was confirmed she already knew both were unlikely. The forensic experts had discovered a dress of hers in one of Max’s drawers. It was the one she had wanted to wear but couldn’t find on the long ago night of her house-warming dinner with Sydney and Mike.

  It was caked in layers of dried semen. The camera angle had not allowed her to see what he was doing when he bucked naked above her unconscious body, but he had not been penetrating her. He had been masturbating above her into the satin folds of the stolen dress. She could not imagine what might have possessed his mind when he performed this perverse act. Nor did she really want to. She just wanted to put her life back together and try to move on from the experience.

  With Jack dead, she was suddenly wealthy. Jack had left her everything. His father was dead, his mother had lost her mind to dementia and was well taken care of and would remain blessedly oblivious to the fact that her son had been murdered. Juliet was to profit from the royalties, Jack’s lawyer Philip Beal told her, of the books she had never bothered to read.

  She sold the house without ever being able to bear going back and seeing it again. They’d been happy there in the earlier part of their marriage, but she was done with the suburbs. And her last, enduring memory of the place was the one she most wanted to forget.

  ‘I got it wrong,’ she said to Sydney, over coffee one aimless morning a week into her enforced idleness.

  ‘He was the one who was unfaithful, hon. You’re going to tell me you drove him into her arms? Remembering the good times with Jack is fine. It doesn’t qualify him for sainthood. Or you for martyrdom.’

  ‘We both got it wrong. We were both to blame. But the marriage could have been saved. We were getting back on track and would have been happy together.’

  ‘Happy ever after? Like in a story? Life isn’t a fairy tale, Jules.’

  ‘Yours seems to be.’

  ‘From the outside, maybe. But we work at it and I was lucky to meet Mike and I’m thankful for that luck every day and believe me, so is he.’

  ‘I thought I’d been given a second chance to get it right. I’d given Jack a chance to make amends. I was on the way to doing so anyway. And wholeheartedly.’ She could feel herself tearing up.

  ‘He’s gone, Jules,’ Sydney said, gently, taking and squeezing her hand. ‘He was taken from you and he lost his life and it was tragic and shocking but he’s gone. You need to accept that.’

  ‘I do.’

  *

  The Tennis Club Blonde turned up at Jack’s funeral. She was almost impossibly stylish in a black calf-length cashmere coat Juliet thought that had probably been bought for the occasion. She introduced herself as Celia Grey and without make up, her hair demurely pinned back under a black pill box hat, Juliet thought she looked very beautiful.

  The time for acrimony had gone. Juliet would have thought that even had she not observed that Celia Grey’s pale blue eyes were raw with grief.

  ‘He loved you,’ Celia said, simply.

  ‘I loved him.’

  ‘You were his world. He didn’t know that, until he’d lost it.’

  ‘He would have got it back,’ Juliet said.

  Sydney gave birth to a baby girl whom they named Sarah. Juliet was asked to be godmother, and it was the one bright spot in her life. She would take the responsibility seriously, she decided, be a proper presence in her life. She never wanted Sarah to feel as alone as she herself now felt.

  On the day of the christening party, just three months after Jack’s death, Juliet was astonished to find herself being asked out by Mike’s brother, Rick. To any other single woman, he would have been a catch: funny, cute, a smart dresser and a lawyer, but the thought of being with another man, being touched by another man, was too horrendous to even contemplate, so she sat outside the restaurant where the christening party was being held trying to put her thoughts in order. She supposed that she must look normal, but if Rick could have seen the turmoil that went on inside, he wouldn’t have come within a mile of her.

  She said as much to Sydney who came out to join her, rocking Sarah in her arms.

  ‘You know, Syd
, it’s ridiculous for me to go out with anyone. I don’t think I could cope. I don’t think they could cope. And I’m homeless again. And we all know what happened last time I was in this situation; it couldn’t have ended worse.’

  ‘I know.’ Sydney sat down beside her, handing Sarah over, as if the sweet, solid weight of the baby could soothe her godmother. ‘You’re not going to find it easy for a while, but even though we have Sarah now, you can still come and live with us. We could do with a babysitter.’

  Juliet smiled. ‘Lovely as that offer is, you’ll have enough disturbance being woken by Sarah’s screams in the night. You really don’t want to add mine to that list.’

  ‘You still have nightmares?’

  Juliet rubbed her eyes wearily. ‘I can’t see how they’ll ever go. I try and put it behind me but it all comes creeping back while I’m asleep. Anyway, once I’m settled, Sarah can come for sleepovers with her auntie Juliet, and when she’s older I’ll feed her nothing but pizza and ice cream when she comes to stay and she’ll never want to leave.’

  ‘I can’t wait, believe me. Once she’s bigger me and Mike will be itching for a bit of down time. Now come on, come back in and I promise Rick won’t make any more inappropriate proposals. Life will settle again, Jules. It won’t ever be the same, but it’ll become normal for you, you’ll see.’

  ‘I know, Syd. That’s what I’m afraid of.’ But she got up, clasping Sarah to her, and returned to the party.

  Forty-five

  JULIET WAS HOUSE-SITTING for one of the surgical residents at the hospital while the resident was on government secondment. It was a nice apartment. But it was temporary and the anxiety of not having a permanent home was a worry to Juliet that she had not the will or the energy to properly confront.

  A week from the end of her temporary let, she received a letter. It arrived on embossed notepaper. It came from a Mr de Silva.

  ‘I’ve remembered who he is. He’s the guy who tried to rent me the place that was haunted,’ she told Sydney over the phone.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly haunted,’ Sydney said. ‘There wasn’t a ghost. Things didn’t exactly go bump in the night.’

  Juliet closed her eyes. She knew all about things going bump in the night. Ghosts were not required for that to happen. Monsters could do it just as effectively. ‘What do you think he wants?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Sydney said. ‘Go see him. Find out what it is he wants. What have you got to lose?’

  ’You’re right; I’ve already lost it all.’

  She remembered that Mr de Silva was a dapper, middle-aged man who wore oil on his hair and a yellow rose in the buttonhole of his lapel. She could not imagine what he could want with her but she remembered him as so courteous in his manners he was almost stately. She could see no harm in going to meet and talk with him.

  She met him in the lobby of the Carlyle. She supposed he had chosen it because it was a public space and she would likely feel safer there. And also because he was known there. As she walked into the hotel she noticed that the staff were solicitous in passing him, nodding and saying his name with little salutes. She gathered that he was probably a lavish tipper. It occurred to her that he might be wealthy in that unostentatious way people are when they have had money all their lives.

  Mr de Silva rose to greet her. He had on an immaculate three-piece pinstripe suit with a gold watch-chain looped in thick links across his waistcoat. She saw his cufflinks when he sat back down and linked his fingers, resting his hands on his knees. The links were gold, with rubies mounted at their centre.

  ‘I’m very grateful that you came.’

  ‘I was intrigued,’ she said. She sipped at the coffee he had ordered for her. The Carlyle did an excellent brew.

  ‘I read the story in the newspapers. A lurid tale, Dr Devereau. Lies and exaggeration?’

  ‘No. On the contrary, almost everything that got printed was true.’

  He nodded. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I feel partially responsible.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘You sensed a spectral presence in the apartment I showed you around. You knew there was a ghost. That was how, in the ninth floor apartment at the Brooklyn Bridge building, you knew there wasn’t a ghost. Am I right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Juliet could not predict where this was leading.

  ‘You knew the place wasn’t haunted, because you’d been somewhere that was. So you found mundane excuses to justify the weird goings-on. You ignored the danger signs until it was too late.’

  ‘You’re right, Mr de Silva. That’s essentially what I did.’

  ‘Without your experience in my building, you would have become scared and suspicious a lot sooner.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true. There’s nothing that can be done about it now, though.’

  ‘I feel culpable,’ de Silva said. ‘I want to make amends. I have a place you might like to move into. The rent is very reasonable.’

  She thought that she would be taking her second cab ride in a day. But when he escorted her outside, the doorman gave a signal and a limousine pulled up with a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. The interior smelled of leather. When they had settled in their seats and were on their way, he smiled at her.

  She said, ‘Did you ever let your haunted apartment?’

  He shook his head. ‘Your visit was the decider. The building is to be demolished. The city of New York has bought the property at a price most advantageous to me. They will build a new police headquarters there.’

  They reached their destination. The building was so new that there was still the adhesive paper that protects the glass in transit on most of the windows. They took the express lift twenty floors up to the penthouse. It was a vast space, laid out like a loft, with pillars supporting the roof in the absence of interior walls.

  Mr de Silva tapped at one of the pillars. They were thin, with a metallic lustre. ‘Titanium,’ he said. He held his arms wide. ‘No neighbours. You have the whole floor to yourself.’

  She looked at the ceiling. ‘And above?’

  ‘A garden,’ he said. ‘Your garden. You can grow anything you like there. I have every confidence that your garden will flourish.’

  ‘I can’t afford this place,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Oh, but you can,’ Mr de Silva said.

  ‘It’s totally out of my league.’

  ‘You can afford it,’ he repeated. ‘Trust me, Dr Devereau. You can.’

  The rent was four thousand dollars a month and was fixed for a five-year term. Five years sounded to Juliet like a reasonable time in which to construct a new life for herself. Her god-daughter Sarah would be reading books by then. What she herself would be doing was far less easy to predict. This apartment would be a good place from which to start. In fact, Juliet thought, it would be perfect.

  ‘You will need to buy furniture, of course,’ Mr de Silva said. ‘You will need to buy a bed.’

  ‘A futon, I think,’ Juliet said.

  Mr de Silva frowned. ‘A futon?’

  She smiled at him. ‘A bed where the mattress lies flat on the floor.’