‘Not remotely,’ Caroline said.
‘There you are then.’
‘We’re all different though, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah, bloody good job an’ all.’
‘You think he knows, the new bloke?’ Caroline looked from face to face. ‘Why there’s an empty chair.’
Chris shrugged. ‘Most of us have known someone who’s snuffed it. Some of us have come pretty close to it ourselves. Part and parcel, isn’t it?’
‘Not like this, though.’
Nobody spoke for a while after that. They ate crisps or tapped the table in time to the landlord’s appalling choice of music. Chris and Diana looked at their phones and Caroline sat tearing a beer mat into tiny pieces.
Then, Robin said, ‘Does anyone else feel guilty?’
The others looked at him.
‘The way we were with her, I mean. In here, that last night.’
‘She was blackmailing you,’ Diana said. ‘I don’t think you should feel bad about being angry.’
‘Well I do,’ Robin said.
Chris said, ‘I don’t feel guilty exactly, because I was out of it. If I was going to beat myself up about every horrible thing I’ve said or done when I was like that, I might as well top myself.’ For a few seconds he studied his finger as it rubbed at an old stain on the tabletop. ‘I know it wasn’t her fault that I got like that, though. Nobody’s stupid fault but mine.’
There was another silence. Diana looked across and saw the barman who had thrown Chris out weeks before, cleaning glasses, watching them. She turned back to the table and said, ‘I was probably a bit harsh, too, that night. It was that dreadful story, the way it chimed with what was happening to me. Stupid, of course, thinking back.’ She took a sip of water and shook her head. ‘Unforgivable, bearing in mind what… well, you know.’
Caroline was sitting next to her. ‘I’ve been starting to think that she made all that stuff up about her and Tony.’
Diana turned to look at her.
‘That’s the reason I was so pissed off with her, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like… something that was probably all in her mind. Just something she wanted to happen.’
‘That makes sense,’ Diana said.
‘Apart from anything else, I can’t believe Tony would ever do that.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘He just… wouldn’t.’
‘Bang on,’ Robin said. ‘I think you’re bang on.’
Diana turned to face front again and sat up straight. ‘We should have a toast.’
‘To what?’ Chris asked.
‘To who, you idiot.’ Diana smiled and shook her head. ‘Who do you think? Just to raise a glass together and say goodbye.’
‘We can do that at the funeral, can’t we?’
‘Whenever that is,’ Caroline said.
Robin leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Sometimes they don’t release the body for ages. If they make an arrest and there’s a trial, the defence sometimes demands a second post-mortem.’
‘Not any time soon then,’ Caroline said.
Diana held up her glass and cleared her throat. ‘Damn, I’ve finished my drink now.’
Chris laughed.
‘What?’
‘It’s sort of appropriate, when you think about it, that’s all.’ He looked to the others at the table for support, then leaned forward, enthused by the idea. ‘A dry toast. Come on…’
After exchanged glances and nods of agreement, they all finished their drinks, some taking longer than others.
They held their empty glasses out, touched them together.
They said Heather’s name.
As coats and bags were quickly gathered to cover the embarrassment, Diana saw that the teenagers at the next table were staring again.
She turned, slowly and deliberately, to look at them.
Said, ‘Would you please mind your own fucking business?’
… NOW
On a street in Muswell Hill, fifty yards or so away from Tony De Silva’s house, the police officer sat in his BMW and decided that psychotherapy must pay a lot better than he thought. A lot better than his job did, anyway. Maybe he would pick up enough over the next few Monday evenings to have a crack at it himself.
On the other end of the phone, his best friend said, ‘So, what are you wearing?’
‘Not sure this is really the time for dirty talk.’
‘Seriously. What look is today’s fashionable junkie-about-town rocking?’
‘I don’t think there’s a uniform, as such.’
‘Actually, thinking about it, I’d’ve thought most of your wardrobe would be fine.’
The police officer laughed sarcastically, even though his friend had a point. A woman walking a golden retriever stared in at him through the window as she passed. He smiled and wondered what he looked like to her. An estate agent? A second-hand car salesman? An undercover copper? He knew very well that, save for those desperate few on the streets or prowling the stages of arenas with electric guitars and dead eyes, a junkie was no easier to spot than a serial killer. He’d encountered more than his fair share of them and had no desire to meet another, but if anything he was even more nervous about what this particular job might entail.
About the people he’d be spending his Monday nights with for the foreseeable future.
According to the report he’d been given a week earlier to study, they were a… volatile bunch, and if the officer who’d put the case together was right, one of them was someone he would need to be very careful with.
‘What’s she like, then?’ he asked. ‘This Tanner?’
Phil Hendricks laughed.
‘What?’
‘I don’t think you’d get on.’
‘Well, she’s certainly thorough.’ Her report had been well thought out and perfectly put together. ‘I’s and ‘T’s suitably dotted and crossed.
‘She’s got a stick up her arse.’
‘Are you suggesting I’m not good with authority or something?’
Another laugh. ‘I think she’s got a problem with the likes of me,’ Hendricks said. ‘A bit homophobic, you know? Old school. Should have heard her at the post-mortem, going on about the piercings.’
‘Well, you do look like you’ve had an accident in an ironmonger’s stockroom.’ Somebody said something in the background. Hendricks’s boyfriend Liam, he guessed.
‘So, what’s your story, anyway?’
‘What?’
‘What are you telling them you’re hooked on? Your drugs of choice. How about cowboy music and a third-rate football team?’
‘Not sure that’s treatable. I thought I’d just go with coke and booze.’
‘Fair enough.’
It would be easy enough to fake, he reckoned. Almost impossible in his job to avoid an intimate acquaintance with addictions of all kinds and of every degree. He didn’t think he’d have much problem with the stories he might be expected to tell either: the damage and the dark secrets. It was hard to deny a certain… propensity; an urge to move towards those things, those people, that belonged in the shadows.
He wondered if that was why they’d thought he was the best man for the job.
‘I should probably make a move.’
‘Call me afterwards,’ Hendricks said. ‘Oh, and if anyone asks what the root cause of your addiction is, tell them it’s homosexual panic.’
… NOW
Nicola Tanner did not believe that small electrical items had any place in a bathroom, so she had turned up the radio in the bedroom and left the door open. Having washed herself quickly, she lay listening to Radio 2, humming along with Michael Bublé and Mumford & Sons, letting the assorted frustrations and niggles of the day drift away as the water cooled.
Emails that had gone unanswered, bolshie lawyers with something to prove, a DC who didn’t know her arse from her elbow.
Nothing Tanner wasn’t used to.
There was an arrangement of candles at one end of the bath,
short, smelly ones, but they were there for decoration as much as anything and Tanner never lit them. She could never be bothered with oils, either, or scented salts, any of that stuff people always thought you’d just love to be given for Christmas. It was all far too fancy and self-indulgent.
Just soap and water, as hot as it could be without actually taking the skin off.
The domestic that Tanner had picked up a couple of weeks earlier had proved to be fairly run of the mill and the pre-trial stuff on two other cases was moving forward smoothly enough. Nothing too demanding and all leaving her far too much time to think about Heather Finlay and whoever had killed her. The strange new ‘family’ she had been part of. Tanner would wake up convinced she knew which one of them it was, but by lunchtime she had usually changed her mind. She could only hope this new approach might yield something positive, though she seriously doubted that the person they were after would slip up any time soon.
Let Malcolm Finlay get those photographs out again.
She sat up when she heard the front door open and close above the aimless babble of the DJ. She heard Susan shout up to her and she shouted back, told her where she was.
Then she waited.
No more than a minute into the next song, she heard Susan shout again and climbed out of the bath. She pulled out the plug and wiped around the edge with a cloth from beneath the basin. She lifted her dressing gown from the back of the door, turned off the radio and went downstairs.
Susan was in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards. Tanner watched her from the doorway, water running from her hair down the neck of her dressing gown.
‘Where’s the wine?’ Now Susan was on her knees, reaching deep into one of the low cupboards near the fridge. ‘We had loads.’
‘I threw it away,’ Tanner said.
Susan stood up, stared at her.
‘And I’ve made an appointment for you to see someone.’
It was the way it had to be, simple as that, because that’s how Nicola Tanner did things. A problem meant chaos and her first instinct when it came to solving that problem was to restore order. Always. It was how she did her job and it was the same way at home, and she didn’t much care if others saw it as odd. If they thought she was a nutter or a neat-freak because she did her paperwork on time and the books on her shelves were arranged according to the colour of their spines.
That’s who she was.
She was the straightener of pictures, the filler-in of forms, the nudger into line.
‘How dare you?’ Susan said.
‘I’ll come with you —’
‘How fucking dare you…?’
Tanner could only stand and watch as Susan raced around the kitchen, throwing open more cupboard doors, becoming increasingly agitated, and she felt the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.
Not because Susan was shouting at her, but because Susan was unhappy.
Tanner said, ‘It’ll be OK, I promise. I’m getting things organised.’
… NOW
Emma had heard the doorbell ring twice in quick succession, so she knew that the freaks were starting to congregate downstairs, that the circus was back open for business. She’d missed it in a messed-up kind of way, but now Monday nights would be something to look forward to again.
It had always given her plenty to tell her mates about.
She took a long slow hit of her skinny joint, let the smoke out slowly, then reached for the remote and turned the music up. She giggled, then turned it up a little further. Her mum was out, same as she usually was when that lot were cluttering her lovely house up, and now her dad had his ringmaster’s hat back on, so there’d be nobody coming up to tell her to turn the volume down for at least a couple of hours.
Lying back on the bed, she decided that once she’d got the letter done, she would wander downstairs and sit not playing the piano for a while.
Sneak down to the kitchen and have a listen…
She picked up her pen and waved it lazily back and forth above the blank page in the notebook. Waiting for the right words to come, the ones that would really make the old bastard think. The money was going up again, too bloody right it was, and that was nobody’s fault but his. Fifteen hundred now, and that would buy her enough weed to see her through to the holidays, maybe further, so she wouldn’t need to dig into her living allowance once she was at university.
Even if it didn’t stretch quite that far, she guessed it would be easy enough to get more. If she scared him enough to pay up once, why couldn’t she do it again? If he was going to cough up at all though, she needed him to know right now that she was deadly serious; that if he ignored this one, he was going to regret it.
She would do it, too.
One anonymous phone call to the police and another to whatever the organisation that kept doctors in line was called. She could always Google the name, though she guessed her dad had all that kind of information on his computer. Just as easy to get it off there, same as it had been to get Dr Robin’s address or anything else she fancied looking at.
Piece of piss when her own birthday was the password.
How lame was that?
Emma closed her eyes, and it might have been a minute or it might have been ten, but when she opened them again, the joint had burned down in the saucer by the side of her bed and she knew exactly what to say. She scribbled the few lines down quickly before she forgot them and began hunting in the folds of her duvet for a lighter.
She would write it out properly later.
… NOW
Once seats had been taken and the circle was complete, Tony made the necessary speech, describing the group and its aims. He made the introductions, then waited for the newcomer.
‘I’m Tom,’ the man said. ‘I’ve been clean and sober for four and a half months.’ He waited, smiled nervously. ‘Isn’t this when I get a round of applause or something?’
Chris laughed and said, ‘This isn’t America, mate.’
‘Fair enough. Sorry.’
‘No need to be,’ Robin said.
Caroline said, ‘Well done though,’ and her congratulations were quickly endorsed with smiles and nods around the circle.
Tony handed the laminated sheet to Diana and she happily read out the statement. ‘This circle is a safe place. It cannot be broken or violated and that which is discussed within it should never be taken outside…’
When she had finished, Tony replaced the sheet beneath his chair and shook his head sadly. ‘This is where I would normally ask if everyone has had a good week, but for obvious reasons, it’s been rather longer than that since we were all together.’ He looked around the circle. ‘I think, if Tom will bear with us, that we should take a few moments to remember Heather.’
‘Absolutely,’ Robin said.
Tony lowered his head.
Caroline leaned towards the newcomer. ‘We lost someone.’
Tony glanced up. ‘I explained everything to Tom on the phone.’ He looked down again and, for half a minute or so, everyone else did the same, hands clasped together or arms folded, ignoring the sound of the piano that had begun to drift down from the floor above.
‘So, how has everyone been?’ Tony asked afterwards. It was the same coded question, if asked a little differently.
Chris was quick to speak up. ‘Well, I’m a hundred per cent better than I was,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be difficult, mind you, considering the state I was in last time we were here. I think it gave me the incentive to clean myself up again, you know? What happened to Heather.’
‘That’s good,’ Tony said.
‘Something like that puts everything else in perspective, doesn’t it?’ Diana looked at Caroline who nodded enthusiastically.
Chris agreed and announced that he’d started to sort out a lot of the other stuff in his life that he’d been ignoring. He’d been to see his brother, he told them, who had spent the last few years in hospital with serious mental health issues and he was trying to pluck up the courage
to tell the truth to his mother about who he was and how he’d been living. ‘I’m trying, you know? Bloody hard, though.’
‘These things are always difficult,’ Tony said. ‘But being honest is usually the right way to go.’
Robin cleared his throat and sat forward. ‘Yes. It’s why I’ve decided to talk about what happened to Peter.’
He told them that his son had been killed in a car accident and that he had been driving. That although he had passed a breathalyser test at the scene, he had been drinking earlier that evening and still believed that his son’s death had been his fault. ‘I took drugs for the first time the day after we buried him,’ he said, looking around. ‘Should have told you all a long time ago, instead of stupid stories about lying to my parents when I was a child.’
‘You’ve told us now,’ Diana said. ‘That’s the main thing.’
Tony seized the opportunity to reiterate his theories about shame and its links to addiction. He focused on the newcomer and explained the project the group had been engaged in before the enforced and tragic hiatus.
‘Now I wouldn’t expect you to do this at your first session,’ he said. ‘Not unless you want to, of course… but it would rather be throwing you in at the deep end.’
‘Yeah, a bit,’ Tom said.
‘Plenty of time,’ Diana said.
Tony said, ‘Of course,’ and turned his attention to the woman sitting next to Tom. ‘What about you, Caroline? I know that a few weeks ago you said you didn’t feel you had anything to contribute.’
‘Still don’t,’ Caroline said, laughing. ‘Sorry.’ She sat back and held out her arms; helpless, apologetic. ‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Really?’ the man next to her asked. ‘Everyone’s done something, surely.’
Caroline turned to the newcomer and smiled. ‘No, not that I can think of.’
Tom Thorne smiled back.
Acknowledgements
This one being a standalone, dealing largely with a subject which is thankfully outside my personal experience, I needed even more help than usual to get to this point. Mike Gunn, to whom this book is dedicated with much love, pointed me in the right direction, and I am immensely grateful to the two gifted practitioners whose insight and advice were invaluable and without whom this novel could never have been written. David Charkham (actor and recovery coach) was enormously generous with his time and expertise, as was Rob Green, MBAC, (Accred) Psychotherapist. I am particularly grateful to Rob for recommending the following books, which were all extremely helpful: Group Psychotherapy With Addicted Populations by Philip J. Flores, PhD; The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy and Love’s Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom. This last was where I found the Thomas Hardy quote which provides the epigraph for Die of Shame.
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