Suspect

by Michael Robotham

  “I can’t help you anymore. I’ve done enough.” She glances at the clock on the stove.

  “Are you expecting someone?”

  “No.”

  “Who did you call earlier?”

  “A friend.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  She hesitates. “No. I left instructions with my secretary. If I didn’t call her back in an hour she had to contact the police.”

  I glance at the same clock, counting backward. “Christ, Mel!”

  “I’m sorry. I have my career to think about.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” My clothes aren’t quite dry, but I wrestle on the trousers and shirt. She grabs at my sleeve. “Give yourself up.”

  I brush her hand aside. “You don’t understand.”

  My left leg is swinging as I try to move quickly. My hand is on the front door.

  “Erskine. You wanted to find him.” She blurts it out. “He retired ten years ago. Last I heard he was living near Chester. Someone from the department contacted him a while back. We had a chat . . . caught up.”

  She remembers the address—a village called Hatchmere. Vicarage Cottage. I scribble the details on a scrap of paper balanced on the hallway table. My left hand refuses to budge. My right hand will have to do.

  All mornings should be so bright and clear. The sun angles through the cracked back window of the Land Rover, fracturing into a disco ball of beams. With two hands on the handle, I force a side window open and peer outside. Someone has painted the world white; turned color into monochrome.

  Cursing the stiffness of the door, I shove it open and swing my legs outside. The air smells of dirt and wood smoke. Scooping a handful of snow, I rub it into my face, trying to wake up. Then I undo my fly and pee on the base of a tree, painting it a darker brown. How far did I travel last night? I wanted to keep going, but the headlights on the Land Rover kept cutting out and plunging me into darkness. Twice I nearly finished up in a ditch.

  How did Bobby spend the night? I wonder if he’s looking for me or watching Julianne and Charlie. He’s not going to wait for me to figure this out. I need to hurry.

  Hatchmere Lake is fringed with reeds and the water reflects the blueness of the sky. I stop at a red-and-white house and ask directions. An old lady, still in her dressing gown, answers the door and mistakes me for a tourist. She starts giving me the history of Hatchmere, which segues into her own life story about her son who works in London and her grandchildren whom she only sees once a year.

  I keep thanking her and backing away. She stands at her front gate as I struggle to start the Land Rover. That’s just what I need. She’s probably an expert on cribbage, crosswords and remembering license plates. “I never forget a number,” she’ll say, as she rattles it off to the police.

  The engine kindly turns over and fires, belching smoke from the exhaust. I wave and smile. She looks concerned for me.

  Vicarage Cottage has Christmas lights strung over the windows and doors. Parked on the front path are a handful of toy cars circled like wagons around an old milk crate. Hanging diagonally across the path is a rust-stained bedsheet with two ends tied to a tree. A boy squats underneath with a plastic ice-cream bucket on his head. He points a wooden stick at my chest.

  “Are you a Slytherin?” he says with a lisp.

  “Pardon?”

  “You can only come in here if you’re from Gryffindor.” The freckles on his nose are the color of toasted corn.

  A young woman appears at the door. Her blond hair is sleep-tossed and she’s fighting a cold. A baby is perched on her hip sucking on a small piece of toast.

  “You leave the man alone, Brendan,” she says, smiling at me tiredly.

  Stepping around the toys, I reach the door. I can see an ironing board set up behind her.

  “I’m sorry about that. He thinks he’s Harry Potter. Can I help you?”

  “Hopefully, yes. I’m looking for Rupert Erskine.”

  A shadow crosses her face. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “Do you know where I might find him?”

  She swaps her baby onto her opposite hip and does up a loose button on her blouse. “You’d be better asking someone else.”

  “Would one of the neighbors know? It’s very important that I see him.”

  She bites her bottom lip and looks past me toward the church. “Well, if you want to see him you’ll find him over there.”

  I turn to look.

  “He’s in the cemetery.” Realizing how blunt the statement sounds, she adds, “I’m sorry if you knew him.”

  Without making a conscious decision I find myself sitting down on the steps. “We used to work together,” I explain. “It was a long time ago.”

  She glances over her shoulder. “Would you like to come in and sit down?”

  “Thank you.”

  The kitchen smells of sterilized bottles and porridge. There are crayons and pieces of paper spread over the table and chair. She apologizes for the mess.

  “What happened to Mr. Erskine?”

  “I only know what the neighbors told me. Everyone in the village was pretty shook up by what happened. You don’t expect that sort of thing—not round these parts.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “They say he came across someone trying to rob the place, but I don’t see how that explains anything. What sort of burglar ties an old man to a chair and tapes his mouth? He lived for two weeks. Some folks say he had a heart attack, but I heard he died of dehydration. It was the hottest fortnight of the year . . .”

  “When was this?”

  “August just gone. I reckon some folks are feeling guilty because nobody noticed him missing. He was always pottering in the garden and taking walks by the lake. Someone from the church choir knocked on the door and a man came to read the gas meter. The front door was unlocked, but nobody thought to go inside.”

  The baby is squirming in her arms. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea? You don’t look too good.”

  I can see her lips moving and hear the question, but I’m not really listening. The ground has dropped away beneath me like a plunging lift. She’s still talking. “. . . a really nice old man, people say. A widower. You probably know that already. Don’t think he had any other family . . .”

  I ask to use her phone and need both hands to hold the receiver. The numbers are barely legible. Louise Elwood answers. I have to stop myself from shouting.

  “The deputy headmistress at St. Mary’s—you said that she resigned for family reasons.”

  “Yes. Her name was Alison Gorski.”

  “When was that?”

  “About eighteen months ago. Her mother died in a house fire and her father was badly burned. She moved to London so she could nurse him. I think he’s in a wheelchair.”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “They think it was a case of mistaken identity. Someone put a petrol bomb through the mail slot. The newspapers thought it might have been an anti-Jewish thing, but there was never anything more said.”

  A rush of fear becomes liquid on my skin. My eyes fix on the young woman who is watching me anxiously from beside the stove. She is frightened of me. I have brought something sinister into her house.

  I make another call. Mel picks up immediately. I don’t give her time to speak. “The car that hit Boyd, what happened to the driver?” My voice sounds strident and thin.

  “The police have been here, Joe. A detective called Ruiz . . .”

  “Just tell me about the driver.”

  “It was a hit and run. They found the four-wheel drive a few blocks away.”

  “And the driver?”

  “They think it was probably a teenage joy rider. There was a thumbprint on the steering wheel, but it matched nothing on file.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Why? What’s this got to do . . .”

  “Please, Mel.”

  She stumbles over the first part of the
story, trying to remember whether it was seven thirty or eight thirty that evening when Boyd went out. It upsets her to think she could have forgotten a detail like this. She worries that Boyd might be growing fainter in her memories.

  It was Bonfire night. The air was laced with gunpowder and sulfur. Neighborhood kids, giddy with excitement, had gathered around bonfires built from scrap wood on allotments and waste ground.

  Boyd often went out of an evening for tobacco. He went to his local for a quick pint and picked up his favorite blend from a liquor store on the way. He wore a fluorescent vest and a canary-yellow helmet. His gray ponytail hung down his back. He paused at an intersection on Great Homer Street.

  Perhaps he turned at the last moment, when he heard the car. He might even have seen the driver’s face in that fraction of a second before he disappeared beneath the bulbar. His body was dragged for a hundred yards beneath the chassis, caught in the twisted frame of his motorcycle.

  “What’s going on?” asks Mel. I imagine her wide red mouth and timid gray eyes.

  “Lucas Dutton, where is he now?”

  Mel answers in a calm, quavering voice. “He works for some government advisory body on teenage drug use.”

  I remember Lucas. He dyed his hair; played golf off a low handicap and collected matchbooks and blends of scotch. His wife was a drama teacher. They drove a Skoda and went on holidays to a campground in Bognor. They had twin girls . . .

  Mel is demanding an explanation, but I talk over her. “What happened to the twins?”

  “You’re scaring me, Joe.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “One of them died last Easter of a drug overdose.”

  I am ahead of her now, reading a list of names: Justice McBride, Melinda Cossima, Rupert Erskine, Lucas Dutton, Alison Gorski—all were involved in the same child protection case. Erskine is dead. The others have all lost someone close to them. What has this got to do with me? I only interviewed Bobby the once. Surely that isn’t enough to explain the windmills, the Spanish lessons, the Tigers and Lions . . . Why did he spend months living in Wales, landscaping my parent’s garden and fixing the old stables?

  Mel is threatening to hang up on me, but I can’t let her go. “Who put together the legal submission for the care order?”

  “I did, of course.”

  “You said Erskine was on holiday. Who signed off on the psych report?”

  She hesitates. Her breathing changes. She is about to lie.

  “I don’t remember?”

  More insistent this time. “Who signed the psych report?”

  She speaks straight through me, directly into the past.

  “You did.”

  “How? When?”

  “I put the form in front of you and you signed. You thought it was a foster-parent authorization. It was your last day in Liverpool. We were having farewell drinks at the Windy House.”

  I moan inwardly, the phone still to my ear.

  “My name was in Bobby’s files?”

  “Yes.”

  “You took it out of the folders before you showed them to me?”

  “It was a long time ago. I thought it didn’t matter.”

  I can’t answer her. I let the phone fall from my hand. The young mother is clutching her baby tightly in her arms, jiggling him up and down to calm his cries. As I retreat down the steps, I hear her calling her older son inside. Nobody wants to be near me. I am like an infectious disease. An epidemic.

  5

  George Woodcock called the ticking of the clock a mechanical tyranny that turned us into servants of a machine that we created. We are held in fear of our own monster—just like Baron von Frankenstein.

  I once had a patient, a widower living alone, who became convinced that the ticking of a clock above his kitchen table sounded like human words. The clock would give him short commands. “Go to bed!” “Wash the dishes!” “Turn off the lights!” At first he ignored the sound, but the clock repeated the instructions over and over, always using the same words. Eventually, he began to follow the orders and the clock took over his life. It told him what to have for dinner and what to watch on TV, when to do the laundry, which phone calls to return . . .

  When he first sat in my consulting room, I asked him whether he wanted a tea or a coffee. He didn’t reply at first. He nonchalantly wandered over to the wall clock and after a moment he turned and said that a glass of water would be fine.

  Strangely, he didn’t want to be cured. He could have removed all clocks from his house or gone digital, but there was something about the voices that he found reassuring and even comforting. His wife, by all accounts, had been a fusspot and a well-organized soul, who hurried him along, writing him lists, choosing his clothes and generally making decisions for him.

  Instead of wanting me to stop the voices he needed to be able to carry them with him. The house already had a clock in every room, but what happened when he went outside?

  I suggested a wristwatch, but for some reason these didn’t speak loudly enough or they babbled incoherently. After much thought, we went shopping at Gray’s Antique Market and he spent more than an hour listening to old-fashioned pocket watches, until he found one that quite literally spoke to him.

  The clock I hear ticking could be the knocking of the Land Rover’s engine. Or it could be the doomsday clock—seven minutes to midnight. My perfect past is fading into history and I can’t stop the clock.

  Two police cars pass me on the road out of Hatchmere, heading in the opposite direction. Mel must have finally given them Erskine’s address. They can’t know about the Land Rover—not yet, at least. The little old lady with the photographic memory will tell them. With any luck she’ll recount her life story first, giving me time to get away.

  I keep glancing in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see flashing blue lights. This will be the opposite of a high-speed police chase. They could overtake me on bicycles unless I can find fourth gear. Maybe we’ll have one of those O. J. Simpson moments, a slow-motion motorcade, filmed from the news helicopters.

  I remember the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Redford and Newman keep wisecracking as they go out to face the Mexican army. Personally I’m not quite as fearless about dying. And I can’t see anything glorious about a hail of bullets and a closed coffin.

  Lucas Dutton lives in a redbrick house in a suburban street, where the corner shops have disappeared and been replaced by drug dealers and brothels. Every blank wall is covered in spray paint. Even the folk art and Protestant murals have been spoiled. There is no sense of color or creativity. It is mindless, malicious vandalism.

  Lucas is perched on a ladder in the driveway, unbolting a basketball hoop from the wall. His hair is even darker, but he’s thickened around the waist and his forehead is etched with frown lines that disappear into bushy eyebrows.

  “Do you need a hand?”

  He looks down and takes a moment to put a name to my face.

  “These things are rusted on,” he says, tapping the bolts. Descending the ladder he wipes his hands on his shirtfront and shakes my hand. At the same time he glances at the front door, betraying his nerves. His wife must be inside. They will have seen the news reports or heard the radio.

  I can hear music coming from an upstairs window: something with lots of thumping bass and shuffling turntables. Lucas follows my eyes.

  “I tell her to turn it down, but she says that it has to be loud. Sign of age, I guess.”

  I remember the twins. Sonia was a good swimmer—in the pool, in the sea, she had a beautiful stroke. I was invited to a barbecue one weekend when she must have been about nine. She announced that she was going to swim the Channel one day.

  “It’ll be much quicker when they build the tunnel,” I’d told her.

  Everyone had laughed. Sonia had rolled her eyes. She didn’t like me after that.

  Her twin sister, Claire, was the bookish one, with steel-framed glasses and a lazy eye. She spent most
of the barbecue in her room, complaining that she couldn’t hear the TV because everyone outside was “gibbering like monkeys.”

  Lucas is folding up the ladder and explaining that “the girls” don’t use the hoop anymore.

  “I was sorry to hear about Sonia,” I say.

  He acts as though he doesn’t hear me. Tools are packed away in a toolbox. I’m about to ask him what happened, when he starts telling me that Sonia had just won two titles at the national swimming championships and had broken a distance record.

  I let him talk because I sense he’s making a point. The story unfolds. Sonia Dutton, not quite twenty-three, dressed up for a rock concert. She went with Claire and a group of friends from university. Someone gave her a white pill imprinted with a shell logo. She danced all night until her heartbeat grew rapid and her blood pressure soared. She felt faint and anxious. She collapsed in a toilet cubicle.

  Lucas is still crouched over the toolbox as though he’s lost something. His shoulders are shaking. In a rasping voice, he describes how Sonia spent three weeks in a coma, never regaining consciousness. Lucas and his wife argued over whether to turn off her life support. He was the pragmatist. He wanted to remember her gliding through the water, with her smooth stroke. His wife accused him of giving up hope, of thinking only of himself, of not praying hard enough for a miracle.

  “She hasn’t said more than a dozen words to me since—not all together in a sentence. Last night she told me that she saw your photograph on the news. I asked her questions that she answered. It was the first time in ages . . .”

  “Who gave Sonia the tablet? Did they ever catch anyone?”

  Lucas shakes his head. Claire gave them a description. She looked at mug shots and a police lineup.

  “What did she say he looked like?”

  “Tall, skinny, tanned . . . he had slicked-back hair.”

  “How old?”

  “Mid-thirties.”

  He closes the toolbox and flips the metal catches, before glancing despondently at the house, not yet ready to go inside. Chores like the basketball hoop have become important because they keep him busy and out of the way.