The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  The man said to Sully, “So who’s this?” and Sully said, “He’s the one I told you about.”

  The man looked at Johanssen keenly. He asked, with only the smallest hint of threat, “And what do you want, eh?”

  Johanssen said, “I want to work,” and killed the urge to add the word sir.

  “What can you do?”

  “Whatever I have to,” Johanssen said. Because this was going to be his life from now on, wasn’t it? This was all that was left.

  The man nodded, and went out. As he passed Sully, Johanssen heard him say, “Use him.”

  That was Charlie Ross, though he didn’t know it then.

  They wouldn’t meet again.

  Within months Ross would be under arrest, because of what happened to Cunliffe in that farmhouse. A year, and he’d be in prison. Another four years, give or take: the Program. Another three months, and he’d be dead.

  When he gets back to the clinic Riley’s sitting in a chair in the main room. He looks Johanssen over, doesn’t smile.

  “I heard,” he says. “What you’re down for?” Nods to himself. “Well. You get a clean slate here, like everyone else. But you touch her—” He stops, choked on his anger.

  Then he shakes his head, gets up, and walks out.

  DAY 15: WEDNESDAY

  KARLA

  Wednesday morning. The surveillance feeds again.

  A brick wall and a broken window: the workshop. At first nothing happens. Then a man walks into shot. He’s looking up at something I and the camera can’t see, looking with an intent, practical kind of focus. Then he stops and turns and glances up into the lens, just once, and the image of Simon Johanssen freezes onto my retina.

  He moves around the workshop. Crouches briefly in the middle of the floor, straightens. Walks out of sight. Comes back—

  It’s in his face: someone else is there now, below the camera, out of shot.

  His mouth moves, soundlessly. A shadow clips the very edge of the frame, then vanishes—they’ve gone. He doesn’t follow. He waits, his face closed and still, and a moment later they come back.

  This time I see her.

  How many times have I looked at her photo? And still I might not have recognized her in the poor light: the gaunt pale woman with dirty, blond hair, bundled up in a jacket several sizes too big for her, her arms wrapped around herself protectively. When she lifts her head there’s something dead about her expression.

  Has he arranged to meet her here so she knows the place? So next time—and it could be any day now—she won’t be afraid?

  They’re talking again. What are they saying? I lean in toward the screen. Impossible to read. But they are talking. That has to be good, that has to be progress: making her talk, making her tell him what she did and why.

  The talking stops. She turns and walks away. Johanssen’s face tells me he’s alone again.

  What did she say to him?

  Since then I’ve stayed by the phone, waiting for a call. It’s never come.

  Wednesday, late afternoon. Craigie arrives, briefcase in hand, as I’m getting ready to go out.

  “What was in that crate, Karla?” The one Powell removed from Laidlaw’s Ealing flat this morning.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Papers. Has to be. Which means Laidlaw kept records.”

  “Records of what? We sanitized everything, Craigie. You know we did. There was nothing to find.” Because that’s what I have to tell myself and him, until we know otherwise. Panicking will get us nowhere.

  He glances at my clothes—discreet dress, minimal jewelry, heels; Charlotte Alton’s wardrobe. “Out tonight?”

  “Supper.”

  He nods. At least that’s something. I’m reinforcing my cover. And he likes me to be Charlotte; finds it safer. Supper can’t be bad.

  He doesn’t know who with.

  I didn’t know if Mark Devlin would be free. I phoned at short notice, on the off chance, even though it’s probably too soon. “Busy tonight?”

  When I reach his office in Moorgate it’s gone six, and dark. The building’s massive atrium spills a wash of golden light across the pavement and the office workers hurrying home. Inside it’s a cavern, the triple-height space broken only by glinting Perspex sculptures suspended on wires from the ceiling and rotating serenely, like giant Christmas-tree decorations. By the window, ugly modern seats surround coffee tables made from single blocks of limestone, artfully strewn with newspapers in half a dozen languages. Security guards in Armani flank the floor. CCTV cameras track me all the way to the reception desk.

  The building houses half a dozen high-end businesses, and their names are displayed behind the desk: a firm of tax specialists, another of corporate lawyers, a stockbroker, a computer security company, a risk management outfit, and Mark Devlin Recruitment.

  When I tell the polished girl on duty that Mr. Devlin is expecting me, she presents me kindly but firmly with a plastic visitor tag on a ribbon, as if it’s a gift I shouldn’t dare refuse, and directs me toward the waiting area by the window. The chairs are as uncomfortable as they look.

  Two minutes later Mark Devlin walks out of the lift, coat on and briefcase in hand. When he spots the visitor tag he takes it off me gently—“We won’t be needing that”—steps over to the desk, smiles blindingly at the girl on duty, hands her the tag, and walks me out of the door.

  “She thought I was here for a meeting. Do I look like a doctor?”

  “Consultant neurosurgeon,” he says. “Definitely. Are you hungry?”

  And right on cue a voice behind us says, “Mr. Devlin.”

  I know the voice; Devlin doesn’t, not immediately. He turns toward it. Ellis is closing in fast: “Mr. Devlin … I was hoping I’d catch you.”

  Devlin shoots a look at me—am I going to witness something he’d rather I didn’t? He says to Ellis, “Excuse me, this is hardly—”

  Ellis ignores him. “Just a small thing: the eighth of December, a year ago—you couldn’t tell me where you were that evening? We’re trying to account for the movements of everyone who knew Dr. Gallagher, on the night she disappeared.” He glances at me—a glance you’d give a stranger—then back at Devlin: patient, stony faced. You’d never guess he doesn’t give a damn.

  Devlin says tightly, “Offhand I can’t remember but—” But he’ll cooperate with the police. He has to. Ellis is virtually daring him not to.

  Devlin’s fished out his smartphone and he’s thumbing keys when Ellis says, “It’s all right, Mr. Devlin, it doesn’t have to be now. But if you’d call me with it? You’ve still got my card?”

  “Of course,” Devlin says. His voice is still taut, but he’s confused, too: why has Ellis so suddenly backed down?

  “Well,” Ellis nods at Devlin, then at me; blank again. “Have a lovely evening.”

  We make to move past him. But he’s not quite done: he holds his place on the pavement, and when I step round him he shifts suddenly, forcing me to brush against him. But Devlin’s half a pace ahead, and I don’t think he sees.

  The place Mark Devlin takes me to has a dining room on the second floor. He knows the maître d’, and we get a table by the window. Beyond the triple glazing, the rush-hour street below is a homeward crawl of brake lights and exhaust, but up here the only sounds are the tinkle of a piano, the murmur of voices. The lights are a low honey yellow.

  We talk. At first about last night: my bruises, the state of his car, the girl, the exhibition, why he stepped out in front of a speeding vehicle (“He could have killed you,” he says, as if that’s a reason, ignoring the fact he could have died too), the ridiculousness of it all … Between us we turn it into a funny story, a shared adventure we can look back on and laugh at. The waiter arrives to take our orders, and after that Devlin asks me about myself, though the questions are all quick-fire, offbeat, elliptical: When I last went abroad, where did I go? What can’t I live without? What do I like most about the place where I live? When I dream, what do I dream
of? I answer fast, dodge the supplementaries, and throw the whole lot back at him. But all the time my head’s full of different questions—What do you know about Catherine Gallagher? Why was everything you said about her cold? And what suddenly made sense to you, the moment Ellis mentioned the psychiatrist?—except that I don’t get the chance to ask.

  My steak arrives bloody, with a knife sharp enough for surgery. He’s ordered grilled fish on the bone, which he dissects efficiently, prizing the flesh from the skeleton with tiny delicate cuts, talking all the while, drawing out my opinions, making me laugh.

  When we’ve finished he sits back in his chair. One finger idly rubs the stem of his wineglass. His hands are strong and masculine, the nails square cut and very clean. In the low light his hair has bright strands of amber in it, like fine hot wire.

  “And now the other question,” he says, and he’s serious.

  “What question’s that?”

  “The one you haven’t asked. A police officer stops me in the street—”

  “You might not want me to.”

  Because you always give them the chance to back out, always. They have to remember afterward that talking was their choice, not yours.

  For a moment he’s silent: staring at his glass, rubbing its stem, picking up the hum of its vibration. Then he says, “Two years ago I had a brief relationship—I met her at a conference, she was a doctor. It lasted a month … ran out of steam … you know.” He pauses. “Eleven months later she disappeared. Walked out of her job, vanished. Never seen again. No one knows what happened.”

  “But that would have been over a year ago.” He nods. “So why are they asking you now?”

  He shrugs. “I suppose they’re reinterviewing everyone she knew. We’re all potential suspects.” He grimaces—no humor in his expression. “The inspector told me she was seeing a psychiatrist. He said she was depressed.”

  “Then surely they must think—”

  “She killed herself. I know.”

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  Another hesitation before he answers. “I’m not sure. She was very steely, very—impressive.” He shakes his head. “I never saw it coming,” and he says it in a way that lifts the hairs on my neck, though I don’t know why.

  “Not at all?”

  “No. But what do I know?” Another of those complicated expressions. “Half a dozen evenings, spread over a month—how much can you learn about someone in that time?”

  I don’t know why, but I think of Johanssen. “Sometimes a lot.”

  “With some people, maybe. Not Catherine.”

  But he’s holding back, I know he is. “You don’t think she killed herself.”

  He glances at me, then back to his glass. Another pause. He’s weighing up his answer. “Sometimes people do just want to vanish. People who no longer want the lives they have. Just walk away, and leave it all behind.”

  “So she no longer wanted her life? Or there was something in it she couldn’t live with anymore.”

  His gaze comes back to me. I’ve said too much.

  Then he says, “I think that she was capable of things other people aren’t. I don’t mean clever things, though she was clever. I mean her boundaries weren’t set up like other people’s. So when she disappeared—” He stops.

  “You thought she’d done something? What?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s just a feeling.” And I know we’ve hit the limit.

  Another glance at me. “You find all this intriguing, don’t you?” But he says it sadly.

  He takes his women as he finds them, doesn’t he? An opportunist who acts like a gentleman throughout, provides good company and uncomplicated sex and something that might pass for intimacy; who doesn’t ask tricky questions, doesn’t want to own the women he sleeps with, won’t make promises he doesn’t intend to keep … Suddenly I’m back outside the gallery under the too-bright streetlights, and he’s saying I can’t just leave you like this … Did he look at Catherine Gallagher like that? And did she think, Why not? Something quick and meaningless, to satisfy an appetite? To help her forget what she’d done?

  And now a police officer’s stopping him in the street, questioning him about her, making him feel like he’s a suspect; making him remember, too, that sense of something dark in her that he didn’t want to understand.

  I never saw it coming. But he did, didn’t he?

  We order coffee and loiter over it. He tells stories of his own, funny stories in which he portrays himself as a hapless idiot. We make each other laugh. At last we ask for the bill and then argue over who’ll pay; in the end we split it. When he walks me outside it’s raining, a light, misty rain, like a memory of childhood seaside holidays, and we huddle under his umbrella to wait for a cab; his shoulder is warm against my cheek, and I can smell his aftershave, a discreet whisper of ozone laced with something darker.

  Mark Devlin: corporate headhunter, womanizer, man about town. And Catherine Gallagher’s ex. But also: a man who doesn’t believe his own publicity, whose smiles have their own complex vocabulary, who steps in front of speeding vehicles. I like him more than I thought I would. More than I thought I’d allow myself to … Just then he turns his head toward me and murmurs, “Or we can go on somewhere else?” When I glance up he’s smiling, and this smile’s like a shared secret, it whispers, Come on, this will be fun …

  I think of all those girls pictured on his arm, and I understand.

  He isn’t a beautiful man, with his imperfect features and his irregular smile. But there’s something bracing about him: being with him is like standing on the edge of a sea cliff on a windy day—breathe in too deeply and you feel dizzy—

  A voice close by says, “Mark?”

  A woman has hesitated a few feet away: early thirties, discreetly well dressed, delicately lovely. “How funny,” she says, “seeing you here.” Her voice has a silvery quality to it, an artificial brightness that doesn’t fit with the searching look she gives him. Then she glances at me and smiles, though in the second between the glance and the smile there’s a sliver of cold assessment, less than the thickness of a knife blade, and I know I’m standing where she wants to be.

  Devlin says to her smoothly, “Anna, this is Charlotte. Charlotte Alton. A friend from the opera.”

  “Hello,” I say, and we all smile; but the smiles ring false, and when she excuses herself and leaves, he visibly relaxes.

  He glances down at me and says, “Anna and I go way back.” As if that explains it all. But she’s thrown him off his stride, the moment’s gone, and he knows it.

  I’m in the taxi when Ellis phones. “Got what you wanted?”

  “Not really.” It’s a half lie. Now I know what piece dropped into place the moment Ellis said the word “psychiatrist” to Devlin: not that she was depressed, not that, but broken, broken in ways that had made her dangerous—

  “Told you so,” he says.

  “And that brush pass was poor.”

  “Really? You seemed to enjoy it.” He hangs up.

  Back at the apartment I take out the stick that Ellis passed to me in the street. The sound file on this one is titled “Roberts.”

  This time the background noises are pub noises. Not a raucous evening shout but a soft blur of voices, piped music, the clink of glasses and cutlery. It sounds like lunchtime in a gastropub in one of London’s middle-class enclaves, all scrubbed tables and leather sofas.

  “So how would you describe Catherine Gallagher?” Ellis.

  And then another voice—cultured, careful, educated: “Oh, highly intelligent. Reliable. Hardworking. Good with technically difficult cases. She had an interest in research—she might have done something special, if …” His voice trails off. If she’d lived.

  A flick through the files has given me the speaker’s name: Aylwyn Roberts, consultant anesthetist, fifty-three years old, father of two, and Catherine Gallagher’s last boss.

  Ellis says, “She a good doctor?”

&nb
sp; “Very knowledgeable. Very focused. Very committed. In her own way.”

  “And what way was that?”

  “Precise. Careful. Determined.”

  “Patients liked her?”

  “Most of our patients are heavily sedated. You save your bedside manner for the families. And the families liked her. She had confidence. Authority. They felt secure with her. They had every reason to. I can’t fault her professionally.”

  Ellis jumps in on that. “What about personally?”

  A hesitation from Roberts. I wait for an echo of Mark Devlin’s comments—the sense of darkness, something broken in her—

  “She was a pleasant colleague. A little distant, sometimes.” The strain’s creeping into his voice. “A private person.”

  But he doesn’t say more than that.

  Roberts hadn’t known she was seeing a psychiatrist; had only found out when the police arrived. “I know, I know, we should have spotted it. Heaven knows, depression isn’t uncommon among doctors. Even when nothing’s said, you can usually sense it: the lack of engagement, the feeling of being … unsupported. But not with her. That was how she was. Private. Closed. Anything could have been going on.” A pause. “Even when she sought treatment she made sure it stayed out of her medical records. She didn’t want anyone to know. The effort that must have taken, to seem normal, to keep pretending …”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “There’s no stigma attached to mental illness in the police force? I congratulate you. The medical profession’s different. We all like to think we can cope. We don’t want to admit it when we can’t.”

  “And it would have affected her career, wouldn’t it? If people had known about the depression.”