Suspect

by Michael Robotham

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “No. I had an appointment with Jock. That’s when he told me about . . . you know what.”

  “Who answered the call?”

  “I don’t know. Meena went home early.”

  I lower my eyes from her gaze. “They’ve dredged up the sexual assault complaint. They think I was having an affair with her—that she threatened to destroy my career and our marriage.”

  “But she withdrew the complaint.”

  “I know, but you can see how it looks.”

  Julianne pushes her cup to the center of the table and slips off her chair. I feel myself relax a little because she’s no longer staring at me. Even without looking at her, I know exactly where she is—standing at the French doors staring through her reflection at the man she thought she knew, sitting at the table.

  “You told me you were with Jock. You said you were getting drunk. I knew you were lying. I’ve known all along.”

  “I did get drunk, but not with Jock.”

  “Who were you with?” The question is short, sharp and to the point. It sums up Julianne—spontaneous and direct, with every line of communication a trunk route.

  “I spent the night with Elisa Velasco.”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had sex with a prostitute?”

  “She’s not a prostitute anymore.”

  “Did you use a condom?”

  “Listen to me, Julianne. She hasn’t been a prostitute for years.”

  “DID . . . YOU . . . USE . . . A . . . CONDOM?” Each word is clearly articulated. She is standing over my chair. Her eyes swim with tears.

  “No.”

  She delivers the slap with the force of her entire body. I reel sideways, clutching my cheek. I taste blood on the inside of my mouth and hear a high-pitched ringing inside my ears.

  Julianne’s hand is on my thigh. Her voice is soft. “Did I hit you too hard? I’m not used to this.”

  “I’m OK,” I reassure her.

  She hits me again, this time even harder. I finish up on my knees, staring at the polished floorboards.

  “You selfish, stupid, gutless, two-timing, lying bastard!” She is shaking her hand in pain.

  I’m now a big clumsy unmoving target. She beats me with her good fist, hammering on my back. She is screaming: “A prostitute! Without a condom! And then you came home and you fucked me!”

  “No! Please! You don’t understand . . .”

  “Get out of here! You are not wanted in this house! You will not see me. You will not see Charlie.”

  I crouch on the floor, feeling wretched and pathetic. She turns and walks away, down the hallway to the front room. I pull myself up and follow her, desperate for some sign that this isn’t the end.

  I find her kneeling in front of the Christmas tree with a pair of garden shears in her hand. She has neatly lopped off the top third of the tree. It now looks like a large green lampshade.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Please listen to me.”

  “Why? What are you going to say to me? That you love me? That she meant nothing? That you fucked her and then you made love to me?”

  That’s the difficulty when arguing with Julianne. She unleashes so many accusations at once that no single answer satisfies them collectively. And the moment you start trying to divide the questions up, she hits you again with a new series.

  She is crying properly now. Her tears glisten in the lamplight like a string of beads draped down her cheeks.

  “I made a mistake. When Jock told me about the Parkinson’s it felt like a death sentence. Everything was going to change—all our plans. The future. I know I said the opposite. It’s not true. Why give me this life and then give me this disease? Why give me the joy and beauty of you and Charlie and then snatch it away? It’s like showing someone a glimpse of what life could be like and in the next breath telling them it can never happen.”

  I kneel beside her, my knees almost touching hers.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. I needed time to think. I couldn’t talk to my parents or friends, who were going to feel sorry for me and give me chin-up speeches and brave smiles. That’s why I went to see Elisa. She’s a stranger, but also a friend. There’s good in her.”

  Julianne wipes her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater and stares at the fireplace.

  “I didn’t plan to sleep with her. It just happened. I wish I could change that. We’re not having an affair. It was one night.”

  “What about Catherine McBride? Did you sleep with her?”

  “No.”

  “Well why did she apply to be your secretary? What would make her think you would ever give her a job after what she put us through?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Julianne looks at her bruised hand and then at my cheek.

  “What do you want, Joe? Do you want to be free? Is that it? Do you want to face this alone?”

  “I don’t want to drag you and Charlie down with me.”

  My maudlin tone infuriates her. She bunches her fists in frustration.

  “Why do you always have to be so fucking sure of yourself? Why can’t you just admit you need help? I know you’re sick. I know you’re tired. Well, here’s a news flash: we’re all sick and we’re all tired. I’m sick of being marginalized and tired of being pushed aside. Now I want you to leave.”

  “But I love you.”

  “Leave!”

  “What about us? What about Charlie?”

  She gives me a cold unwavering stare. “Maybe I still love you, Joe, but at the moment I can’t stand you.”

  4

  When it is over—the packing, the walking out the door and the cab ride to Jock’s doorstep—I feel like I did on my first day at boarding school. Abandoned. A single memory comes back to me, with all the light and shade of reality. I am standing on the front steps of Charterhouse as my father hugs me and feels the sob in my chest. “Not in front of your mother,” he whispers.

  He turns to walk away and says to my mother, “Not in front of the boy,” as she dabs at her eyes.

  Jock insists I’ll feel better after a shower, a shave and a decent meal. He orders takeout from his local Indian, but I’m asleep on the sofa before it arrives. He eats alone.

  In the motley half-light, leaking through the blinds, I can see tinfoil trays stacked beside the sink, with orange-and-yellow gravy erupting over the sides. The TV remote is pressing into my spine and the weekly program guide is wedged under my head. I don’t know how I managed to sleep at all.

  My mind keeps flashing back to Julianne and the look she gave me. It went far beyond disappointment. Sadness is not a big enough word. It was as though something had frozen inside her. Very rarely do we fight. Julianne can argue with passion and emotion. If I try to be too clever or become insensitive she accuses me of arrogance and I see the hurt in her eyes. This time I saw only emptiness. A vast, windswept landscape that a man could die trying to cross.

  Jock is awake. I can hear him singing in the shower. I try to swing my legs to the floor but nothing happens. For a fleeting moment I fear I’m paralyzed. Then I realize that I can feel the weight of the blankets. Concentrating my thoughts, my legs grudgingly respond.

  The bradykinesia is becoming more obvious. Stress is a factor in Parkinson’s disease. I’m supposed to get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly and try not to worry about things.

  Yeah, right!

  Jock lives in a mansion block overlooking Hampstead Heath. Downstairs there is a doorman who holds an umbrella over your head when it rains. He wears a uniform and calls people “Guv” or “Madam.”

  Jock and his second wife used to own the entire top floor, but since the divorce he can only afford a one-bedroom apartment. He also had to sell his Harley and give her the cottage in the Cotswolds. Whenever he sees an expensive sports car he claims it belongs to Natasha.

  “When I loo
k back it’s not the ex-wives that frighten me, it’s the mothers-in-law,” he says. Since his divorce he has become, as Jeffrey Bernard would say, a sort of roving dinner guest on the outside looking in and a fly on the wall of other people’s marriages.

  Jock and I go a lot further back than university. The same obstetrician, in the same hospital, delivered us both on the same day, only eight minutes apart. That was on the eighteenth of August 1960, at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in Hammersmith. Our mothers shared a delivery suite and the OB had to dash back and forth between the curtains.

  I arrived first. Jock had such a big head that he got stuck and they had to pull him out with forceps. Occasionally he still jokes about coming second and trying to catch up. In reality, competition is never a joke with him. We were probably side by side in the nursery. We might have looked at each other, or kept each other awake.

  It says something about the separateness of individual experience that we began our lives only minutes apart but didn’t meet again until nineteen years later. Julianne says fate brought us together. Maybe she’s right. Aside from being held upside down and smacked on the ass by the same doctor, we had very little in common.

  I can’t explain why Jock and I became friends. What did I offer to the partnership? He was a big wheel on campus, always invited to the best parties and flirting with the prettiest girls. My dividend was obvious, but what did he get? Maybe that’s what they mean when they say people just “click.”

  We long ago drifted apart politically and sometimes morally, but we can’t shake loose our history. He was best man at my wedding and I was best man at both of his. We have keys for each other’s houses and copies of each other’s wills. Shared experience is a powerful bond, but it’s not just that.

  Jock, for all his right-wing bluster is actually a big softie, who has donated more money to charity than he settled on either of his ex-wives. Every year he organizes a fund-raiser for Great Ormond Street and he hasn’t missed a London Marathon in fifteen years. Last year he pushed a hospital bed with a load of “naughty” nurses in stockings and suspenders. He looked more like Benny Hill than Dr. Kildare.

  Jock emerges from the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He pads barefoot across the living room to the kitchen. I hear the fridge door open and then close. He slices oranges and fires up an industrial-size juicer. The kitchen is full of gadgets. He has a machine to grind coffee, another to sift it and a third, which looks like a cannon shell rather than a percolator, to brew it. He can make waffles, muffins, pancakes or cook eggs in a dozen different ways.

  I take my turn in the bathroom. The mirror is steamed up. I rub it with the corner of a towel, making a rough circle large enough to see my face. I look exhausted. Wednesday night’s TV highlights are printed backward on my right cheek. I scrub my face with a wet washcloth.

  There are more gadgets on the windowsill, including a battery-powered nasal-hair trimmer that sounds like a demented bee stuck in a bottle. There are a dozen different brands of shampoo. It reminds me of home. I always tease Julianne about her “lotions and potions” filling every available inch of our en suite. Somewhere in the midst of these cosmetics I have a disposable razor, a can of shaving foam and a deodorant stick. Unfortunately, retrieving them means risking a domino effect that will topple every bottle in the bathroom.

  Jock hands me a glass of orange juice and we sit in silence staring at the percolator.

  “I could call her for you,” he suggests.

  I shake my head.

  “I could tell her how you’re moping around the place . . . no good to anyone . . . lost . . . desolate . . .”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

  He asks about the argument. He wants to know what upset her. Was it the arrest, the headlines or the fact that I lied to her?

  “The lying.”

  “I figured as much.”

  He keeps pressing me for details. I don’t really want to go there, but the story comes out as my coffee grows cold. Perhaps Jock can help me make sense of it all.

  When I reach the part about seeing Catherine’s body in the morgue, I suddenly realize that he might have known her. He knew a lot more of the nurses at the Marsden than I did.

  “Yeah, I was thinking that,” he says, “but the photograph they put in the paper didn’t ring any bells. The police wanted to know if you stayed with me on the night she died,” he adds.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Where were you?”

  I shrug.

  “It’s true then. You’ve been having a bit on the side.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “It never is, old son.”

  Jock goes into his schoolboy routine, wanting to know all the “sordid details.” I won’t play along, which makes him grumpy.

  “So why couldn’t you tell the police where you were?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  Frustration passes quickly across his face. He doesn’t push any further. Instead he changes tack and admonishes me for not talking to him sooner. If I wanted him to provide me with an alibi, I should have at least told him.

  “What if Julianne had asked me? I might have given the game away. And I could have told the police you were with me, instead of dropping you in the shit.”

  “You told the truth.”

  “I would have lied for you.”

  “What if I had killed her?”

  “I still would have lied for you. You’d do the same for me.”

  I shake my head. “I wouldn’t lie for you if I thought you’d killed someone.”

  His eyes meet mine and stay there. Then he laughs and shrugs. “We’ll never know.”

  5

  At the office I cross the lobby aware that the security guards and receptionist are staring at me. I take the lift upstairs to find Meena at her desk and an empty waiting room.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “They canceled.”

  “Everyone?”

  I lean over her desk and look down the appointments list for the day. All the names are crossed out with a red line. Except for Bobby Moran.

  Meena is still talking. “Mr. Lilley’s mother died. Hannah Barrymore has the flu. Zoe has to mind her sister’s children . . .” I know she’s trying to make me feel better.

  I point to Bobby’s name and tell her to cross it out.

  “He hasn’t called.”

  “Trust me.”

  Despite Meena’s best efforts to clean up, my office is still a mess. Evidence of the police search is everywhere, including the fine graphite powder they used to dust for fingerprints.

  “They didn’t take any of your files, but some of them were mixed up.”

  I tell her not to worry. The notes cease to be important if I no longer have any patients. She stands at the door, trying to think of something positive to say. “Did I get you into trouble?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The girl who applied for the job . . . the one who was murdered . . . should I have handled it differently?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  This is the first time that anyone has acknowledged the fact that Catherine’s death might have saddened me. Everybody else has acted as though I have no feelings one way or the other. Maybe they think I have some special understanding of grief or control over it. If that’s the case, they’re wrong. Getting to know patients is what I do. I learn about their deepest fears and secrets. A professional relationship becomes a personal one. It can be no other way.

  I ask Meena about Catherine. How did she sound on the phone? Did she ask questions about me? The police took away her letters and job application, but Meena has kept a copy of her CV.

  She fetches it for me and I glance at the covering letter and the first page. The problem with a curriculum vitae is that it tells you virtually nothing of consequence about a person
. Schools, exam results, tertiary education, work experience—none of it reveals an individual’s personality or temperament. It is like trying to judge a person’s height from their hair color.

  Before I can finish reading, the phone rings in the outer office. Hoping it might be Julianne I pick up the call before Meena can patch it through. The voice on the line is like a force-ten gale. Eddie Barrett lets loose with a string of colorful invective. He is particularly imaginative when it comes to describing uses for my Ph.D. in the event of a toilet paper shortage.

  “Listen, you overqualified headshrinker, I’m reporting you to the British Psychological Society, the Qualifications Board and the U.K. Registrar of Expert Witnesses. Bobby Moran is also going to sue you for slander, breach of duty and anything else he can find. You’re a disgrace! You should be struck off! More to the point, you’re an asshole!”

  I have no time to respond. Each time I sense a break in Eddie’s diatribe, he simply rolls on through. Maybe this is how he wins so many cases—he doesn’t shut up for long enough to let anyone else get a word in.

  The truth is I have no defense. I have broken more professional guidelines and personal codes than I can list, but I would do the same again. Bobby Moran is a sadist and a serial liar. Yet at the same time I feel a terrible sense of loss. By betraying a patient’s trust I have opened a door and crossed a threshold into a place that is supposed to be out of bounds. Now I’m waiting for the door to hit me in the ass.

  Eddie hangs up and I stare at the phone. I press the speed dial. Julianne’s voice is on the answering machine. My guts contract. Life without her seems unthinkable. I have no idea what I want to say. I try to be cheerful because I figure Charlie might hear the message. I finish up sounding like Father Christmas. I call back and leave another message. The second one is even worse.

  I give up and begin sorting out my files. The police emptied my filing cabinets, looking for anything hidden at the back of the drawers. I look up as Fenwick’s head peers around the door. He is standing in the corridor, glancing nervously over his shoulder.

  “A quick word, old boy.”