by Helen Fields
Anger, it turned out, was a cure in itself. She didn’t want to die any more. Countering the rap music with Italian opera, she’d bought a speaker that would drown out a whole festival. She’d joined a bingo club because her husband had spent his life bitching about women who spent money on such frivolities. It had turned out to be rather good fun, too. And she’d stopped looking for her daughter through missing persons websites and family reunion agencies, accepting the reality that there was nothing she could do to bring someone back who was either dead or who wanted to remain lost. Let fate play its games, was her new philosophy. She would simply be carried along on the tide.
Then there’d been a knock at her door at noon one Tuesday. Who the hell worried about answering the door between elevenses and lunch? Nothing bad happened at that time of day, not on a Tuesday in your own home. It wasn’t unusual for one of the other tenants simply to buzz people in without asking for so much as a name. The pizza delivery guy regularly just pressed any old button and worried about checking the flat number when he was indoors, out of the rain.
Fenny had answered the door hoping it hadn’t been the Jehovah’s back to talk her ear off again. She always felt guilty when she told them to get lost but the result of her not doing so was sometimes a thirty-minute polite conversation about how nicely printed their brochures were as she figured out an excuse to shut the door.
Instead, the man at her door was looking sombre and professional.
‘Mrs Hawksmith,’ he said, holding up a badge dangling from a brightly coloured lanyard. ‘I’m from a family reintroduction charity. We have information about your daughter, Alice. Could we talk, if it’s not a bad time?’
She hadn’t given it a second thought. Thirty seconds later, she was brushing crumbs off her couch so he had somewhere to sit without ruining his smart trousers. Her head had been reeling. News of her daughter, after so long … So she wasn’t dead. If she’d been dead, it would have been the polis at her door.
Standing in the middle of her tiny sitting room, Fenny had shifted from foot to foot, wanting to hear the news, dreading what it might be, clinging on to hope she’d long since forgotten existed.
‘Is there anyone here who might support you or are you alone today?’ the man had asked.
‘No, it’s just me …’
Fenny realised in her excitement that she hadn’t even asked the man’s name. Now she wasn’t sure how to backtrack, not that she wanted to waste any time. There was news. It was suddenly worth every birthday and Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every morning when her daughter’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Finally, there was the prospect of something other than the void of loss.
‘Just to clarify, you aren’t cohabiting or flat-sharing at the present time. It’s important to establish that any information we share with you will remain confidential, you see.’
‘Yes, absolutely,’ Fenny had gushed. ‘It’s just me here. If you have some news, I promise not to talk to anyone else about it.’
‘Good,’ he’d said reassuringly. ‘That all sounds fine. Finally, I need to assess your current mental state. We often find that people have very strong reactions to being given news about loved ones who’ve been missing for a sustained period, and the process of attempting a reintroduction can be fraught with difficulties and disappointments. That’s not a journey we recommend people embark upon unless they’re in a good place emotionally.’
Reintroduction. She hadn’t imagined it. He’d said the word. Her daughter was not just alive but was somewhere accessible and in a fit state to make contact. In that moment, she believed in everything. Karma, kismet, destiny, God, four-leafed clovers – the whole shebang. There was a reason she’d decided to blow money on a hotel room to end it all. There was a reason the housekeeping woman had come in at the worst – now the best – possible moment. The endless stretches in yoga had been worth every second of humiliation and fake smiles. The tranquillisers that had made her feel nauseous. The therapy where she’d poured out every sordid or boring detail of her life. They’d all led her here.
She crossed the room – just three steps, but her legs were jelly and she worried she might not make it – to pick up Alice’s photo from the windowsill. In it, her precious seven-year-old had just won a drawing competition. She’d had a real talent, certainly not inherited from Fenny. Drawing faces was what she’d been best at, spending hours of her young life at a table, getting through notepad after notepad.
Fenny still had some of those drawings tucked away in an envelope, hidden in a box with her wedding photos and Mother’s Day cards so dearly prized that she dared not take them out and handle them any more. Inside were the childish declarations of forever love that had become screams of hatred as drugs had made her daughter’s world a place where the only warm arms she welcomed were delusions that came from plastic wraps, and where only handing her money was enough to induce her to profess love.
‘Where is she?’ Fenny had whispered, the muscles in her face rising to produce an unfamiliar picture.
Smiles had been absent from her outlook for so long that forming one was an alien sensation.
‘I don’t know,’ the man said, ‘do you think you deserve to see her?’
Fenny’s smile drooped a little.
‘Deserve?’ she asked slowly. ‘Yes, of course, why would I not deserve to see my baby?’
‘Have you treasured your life, Fenella?’
‘Of course I have. My husband’s gone. He’d have done anything to have looked into our girl’s eyes again. Now I’m the only one left and I’ll have to do that for both of us. She doesn’t even know her daddy’s passed. I’m not sure how I’m going to break that to her.’ Fenny’s legs finally gave way and she lowered herself onto the sofa, taking deep breaths.
‘Your husband couldn’t have prevented his death though, could he? It was cancer that took him, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Um …’ she stalled.
The last thing Fenny wanted was to be impolite to the man who was trying to help her, but she wasn’t sure quite where he was getting his information. Alice would have had no way of knowing about the tragedy that had struck in her absence and Fenny didn’t recall giving any of the reunification agencies the details of her husband’s illness.
‘Yes, lung cancer. I signed up with a few agencies when I was trying to find my daughter. I was a bit surprised when you turned up and I missed the name of the one you’re from.’
‘But you …’ – he continued as if she hadn’t said a word – ‘have taken the gift of life for granted. You thought you could throw it away. You decided your need to be rid of the responsibilities that come with your place in this world was more important than valuing what you were given.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ Fenny said. ‘What does this have to do with my daughter?’
‘Are you still taking your medication, or did you decide you knew better than the people who were trying to help you?’ he asked.
Fenny put the photo of Alice that she’d been clutching down on the coffee table with a shaking hand.
‘Who sent you?’ she asked quietly. ‘Was it someone from the hospital? Is this part of their follow-up regime? Am I being tested? Only if this is all just part of their scheme to make sure I’m still in recovery, then using the information I gave them about my daughter is …’
She couldn’t finish the sentence. There was no phrase that was strong enough to express the disgust she felt at what was happening.
Fenny looked the man up and down. He didn’t have a file with him. No papers at all. Surely if he’d come to talk about her daughter, he’d be making some notes, or asking her to sign a document, or even check her identity. Looking around the sitting room, she tried to recall where she’d left her glasses so she could read the awfully small print that was currently just a blurred mass on his ID badge.
‘Fenella, we need to have a conversation and I need you to give me the right answers,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’ll need to con
centrate. I’m going to help you with that, okay? I’m going to make it all much easier for you.’
‘I want to see my daughter,’ Fenny said, looking at the bulge in the man’s trouser pocket.
It certainly wasn’t mobile phone-shaped and the broad curves suggested something other than a set of keys.
‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘How much time do you spend actually thinking about her? Once a day? Does she even get that much from you? Isn’t it more realistic that you think about her maybe once a week?’
Fenny stood up, closer to him than she was comfortable with, lifting her face several inches to look at him directly.
‘There’s not an hour of the day that goes by when I don’t think of my girl,’ she said, tears filling her eyes and rage tensing every muscle.
‘Do you?’ he smiled. ‘Does a mother who actually loves her missing child really attempt suicide? I think not. I believe that you’d wait for her as long as it took, because if there was the most minuscule chance that your daughter might come home, or get arrested, might end up in a hospital and ask for you, you ought to be there for her. Why would you attempt to deprive that poor girl of her only surviving parent? That’s just not right.’
He reached out and took hold of Fenny’s left hand with his right. Something about his touch felt off, too cool, fake. She raised her hand in his grasp to get a better look.
Gloves. Whoever this man was, for some reason he was wearing clear plastic gloves.
As she opened her mouth to put the question she was thinking into words, she felt a thump that was punctuated by a metallic snap over her left wrist. The dangling handcuff was closed but not overly tight. Ridiculously, she wondered if he was police, after all – not there to notify her of her daughter’s death but to arrest her for some parenting offence she hadn’t even known she’d committed. The wrongness took a few seconds to sink in.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re up to? You’ve got to get out of my place right now. Do you hear me?’
The man laughed.
Fenny tugged at the handcuff. She didn’t even want him to get the cuff off. That would mean him touching her again and she really didn’t want that. Not with those creepy gloves on.
‘You want me to leave already? But you haven’t heard what I came to tell you about Alice yet,’ he said.
‘You’re not here to talk to me about my daughter,’ Fenny said. ‘Now get the fuck out of my flat, you friggin’ weirdo, or I’m calling the police.’
The man turned his attention to the speaker that dwarfed Fenny’s room, switching it on and scrolling down the iPod that allowed Fenny to randomise music for hours at a time without bothering with it.
‘You like opera, right? I’ve heard it through your door before,’ he said. ‘A couple of times it’s been so loud that I could hear it from the street.’ He hit a button and violins filled the air in a dramatic minor key. ‘It’s the one thing about you that impressed me. An appreciation for the arts is what separates us from the beasts.’
As Fenny screamed, the man simply turned the music louder. From the floor below came the retaliatory strains of an American rapper.
‘Let’s take this into the bathroom, Mrs Hawksmith, as that’s your preferred location.’
He led her by the handcuff towards the bathroom and that was enough to break her from her shocked inaction. Fenny made a dash for her front door, ripping the handcuff through his fingers and sprinting. He’d been waiting for her to make a move. That was what she realised as she crashed to the floor, courtesy of him hooking an outstretched ankle between her legs and watching calmly as she greeted the carpet with her jaw.
‘Fucker,’ Fenny murmured.
He pulled her back up by her hair and tutted.
‘That’s right. Now you want to live. Now you’ve decided to stop being an ungrateful, whining little bitch and protect what you have. Only it’s mine. You wanted to give it away and fortunately for you, I’m the one person who’ll value that gift.’
‘I never wanted to die,’ Fenny shrieked. ‘Not really. It was depression. I didn’t know how to cope with it then, but I learned at the hospital. They helped me. Who are you? You’re not from a charity. Who told you about me?’
‘What do you think your poor dead husband would make of it? He contracted a terrible, inescapable disease and lost his life to it unwillingly. Then you decided to go and throw yours away, with no consideration at all for the beauty of it, for the power humans harness within their bodies. You treated your own life as disposable after his was stolen from him. You know what I think, Mrs Hawksmith? I think your husband would decide that you’d forfeited your right to live.’
He drew a gun from inside his jacket. Fenny had never seen a real gun before. It was smaller than she’d imagined but it unleashed evil into the atmosphere. Its very presence seeped poison.
‘Take off your clothes,’ the man ordered, ‘and get into the bath.’
Fenny looked down into the porcelain whiteness and saw death waiting for her.
‘I don’t want to,’ she sobbed.
‘That’s good. Not wanting to is good. It’s the start of your healing process. Take your clothes off.’
A swarm of flies were buzzing inside Fenny’s brain and she couldn’t make the zipper of her trousers work, no matter how hard she tried.
‘I have some jewellery,’ she pleaded. ‘And some money in my purse. My grandpa’s war medals, too. They’re worth something. You can have all of it. I don’t care. Please don’t kill me.’ Somehow, she dropped her trousers to the floor. ‘Remember, you said I needed to be here for Alice, and you were right. She could turn up any day. She might even have a wee baby she needs help with.’ Her hands shook as she fussed with the buttons on her shirt. ‘I could get more treatment, just to make sure I never do anything stupid again. I’ll do whatever you want. Just … not this. I don’t want to get into the bath.’
Fenny cried and he nodded appreciatively.
‘Please don’t make me. Please, please don’t make me …’
‘All of your clothes. Just like you did it before. I want to see it just the way it was.’ He motioned with the gun for her to remove her knickers.
Fenny stared down the barrel, wondering if it was really loaded. The bullet would be faster than whatever he had in mind for her, she was certain of that. His eyes had all the warmth of a reptile. It was amazing that she hadn’t seen it straight away at her front door. The smile was perfect, the clothes were neat and the talk was all reassurance, but if the eyes really were the windows to the soul then his revealed a sort of no-man’s land, where life had long since given up the battle. Even the creepy-crawly things that normally thrived on death and decay had deserted that place. Inside this man was an endless echo of nothing.
Fenny knew right then that no amount of begging, crying, screaming or pleading would make a difference. It was the end. She stepped into the tub and followed the remainder of his instructions without a fight. It seemed easier that way.
Chapter Ten
5 March
Ava swallowed the first antibiotic capsule with a glass of orange juice and lifted her extremely sore leg up onto Callanach’s couch. It was 12.30 a.m. and the city was remarkably quiet.
‘You believe there’s any chance Mrs Hawksmith committed suicide?’ Ava asked.
‘Physically, that would have been just about possible, but it doesn’t feel real. Why stress yourself out with the cable ties around your ankles?’
‘Maybe to make sure you can’t change your mind,’ Ava said. ‘If it had just been the cable ties, I might have believed it. It was the handcuffs that did it for me. They gave the whole scene a sense that a tableau had been constructed. Someone had worked hard building that image in their mind. They’d seen how it would play out. Surely you don’t plan a suicide like that. It’s reactive, chaotic in most instances. I’m no expert, but I’d have said your natural instinct is to give yourself some sort of flexibility or an out clause. Also, an element of comfort or e
ase. No one wants their death to be that traumatic, no matter how depressed they are. You spoke to a witness from a suicide support group about the Stephen Berry killing, didn’t you? Do you think he’d be willing to come in and talk to me about it? I reckon we’d benefit from having an expert to give a second opinion.’
Callanach thought about it, knowing Ava was right and that Rune Maclure would probably be more than happy to help. The idea that the two of them would be ideally suited struck him again. Maclure would make Ava laugh, he thought, and put her at ease. He was the right age for her and Callanach was pretty sure he hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. That didn’t mean he was single, of course, but if he was … Callanach stopped himself there. He had no right to limit Ava’s access to men who might be good for her, or bad for her, for that matter.
‘Yeah, his name’s Rune Maclure. I’ll talk to him tomorrow,’ he compromised. ‘You go to the postmortem and get what you can from Ailsa. We can meet back at the station and debrief the team. It’ll save time.’
‘You’ll have other things to think about tomorrow. Pax Graham’s going to have to interview you about the nursing home death and the sooner we get that over with, the better. He needs an official statement on file in case you have any relevant facts that might assist and it’ll ensure that we’ve followed proper procedure. What I still don’t know is why you were there in the first place. Seems like a long time ago now, but that is the reason I came round earlier.’
‘I’m going to need a drink for that conversation, even if you can’t join me,’ he said, walking to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of red wine.
‘Do you have any beer?’ Ava shouted after him.
‘Yes, but you can’t have it. Doctor’s orders. How did Selina seem to you?’
Ava considered how to answer that. Selina had been a number of things. Upset, angry, bereft. Jealous. That was the word Ava was avoiding. Jealous of her and Callanach’s relationship. She’d got the wrong impression, that much was clear, only how could she explain that without embarrassment. Natasha had teased her about Callanach plenty of times, but that was just ribbing. There was nothing behind it.