A sigh. “Officially it should make no difference.”
“But it does.”
“But people think it does.”
“And she was ambitious?”
“Her career was important to her, very important. Add to that, the fact that she was a perfectionist: of course she covered it up. Anything else would have been an admission of failure.”
“When you say ‘perfectionist’…”
“She set high standards for herself. Prided herself on never making mistakes.”
“Good for her patients.”
“Yes. But hard for her.” He seems to think about that for a moment. “Maybe that was part of the problem. It’s an ICU. People die. Despite your best efforts, they die.”
“She had problems with patients dying?” Ellis asks sharply. “Any particular patient?”
“No one patient in particular.” A pause, as if he’s struggling to explain. “As doctors we like to feel we’re in control, but we’re not, even with the best will in the world. Losing a patient reminds you of that.”
“So she needed to be in control.”
“Yes. Maybe suicide’s the ultimate expression of that? The only way she could stay in control.” Then he says, “I saw the picture from the CCTV, you know. I still think of her leaving home that evening. As if she was just going on shift. But she wasn’t.” Another pause. Is he shaking his head? “I hope you find her, I really do. I don’t like the idea of her lying out there somewhere. But it’s like her: not wanting to be found. It’s like her.”
A long pause, then Ellis says, “She asked for time off work. She told you her mother was sick. Anything unusual about that?”
“I knew her mother had health problems.”
“She seemed worried?”
“She seemed—a little agitated. But she was very diligent, she took her responsibilities seriously. That was what I put it down to: the fact that she was asking people to cover for her, at extremely short notice. Of course I realized afterward, she was—well.” Aylwyn Roberts’s voice fades slightly; perhaps he’s turned his head away. “She must have been planning it then.”
But he saw no change in Catherine’s behavior in the weeks before. Because she didn’t know what was coming? Or because she did, but kept it hidden?
And then at last, the big question from Ellis: “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her?”
Roberts sounds appalled. “You’re suggesting that someone—” He breaks off.
“Was there anyone who might have felt anger toward her? Who might have had a motive for hurting her?”
A silence. Background noises filter into the gap: plates being stacked, cutlery gathered, laughter from another table.
Roberts says, “You’ve found a body.”
“No.”
“But you think—”
“We’re just taking a look at the case from other angles.” Another silence. Ellis tries again. “Maybe a patient died, the family found it hard to accept, they felt she was to blame—”
The ugly death I still haven’t managed to find.
Roberts says, “There’s nothing.”
“You quite sure about that?”
“Absolutely sure.”
Ellis says, “Well, if you think of anything …” He must be handing over his contact details. “Thanks for seeing me—”
There’s the faintest of buzzes. Ellis’s phone? Must be. A brief pause: maybe an apologetic grimace to Roberts? Then Ellis says to the person on the phone, “So what is it this time?” and immediately the recording cuts out, but not before I’ve realized the track in the background is Miles Davis, “So What” from Kind of Blue.
He was talking to me.
Sunday lunchtime, I called him to ask if he would question Catherine Gallagher’s colleagues. But he’d already started.
“How many, Ellis? How many of her colleagues have you spoken to since Sunday morning?”
He barely hesitates before he says, “The lot,” and it’s like a challenge.
“The lot.” Of course. It doesn’t take much with Ellis. One sniff of Catherine Gallagher’s case—one hint of my interest—was enough for someone as hungry, as ambitious, as he is. He believes Catherine Gallagher was murdered and he wants the collar, and he wants to make sure he’s one step ahead of me so I can’t stop him getting it. “And you were going to tell me when?” I ask.
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“I want those recordings. All of them.”
“You’ll get them,” he says. “I’m done with them. Waste your time, God knows I had to.” There’s an edge of bitterness in his voice: almost accusatory. “Interviewed fucking everyone in that unit, and you know what? I got nothing. She wasn’t a pain, she wasn’t a bitch, but not one of them set foot in her flat, not once. Oh, there was the odd drink in a pub, the odd movie, but that’s all. Parties, she’d turn up, make polite conversation, but she’d be the first to leave, and she was always sober. No one got close.”
“But what about—”
“The job? She was married to it. And she was good at it. There’s nothing against her.”
“You’re sure?”
“You told me to look for medical negligence, right? Suspicious deaths, grieving family, someone with a grudge? So I did. You know what I got? No complaints, no rumors, no gossip, not even one anonymous letter. And no hushed-up scandal either, not a whisper. Yeah, people died on her watch—she was a doctor in an ICU, ’course they died: at the same rate they die in any other ICU in the country. I did check the figures, Karla, I’m not stupid. So who’d wanna harm her? Some random nutter? Or a serial killer maybe”—his voice takes on the twisted brightness of sarcasm—“I could do with a serial killer, it’d look good on the CV.” Then the sarcasm drops out: his tone’s got that accusing edge to it again. “ ’Cept you’re telling me someone had motive. Which means this isn’t random, it’s premeditated. So there’s a whole truckload of shit I haven’t even got a sniff at yet. And I’m not getting any clues from you, am I? Why’d you put me on this, Karla? There’s no body, there’s no suspects—”
“There’s something wrong with her disappearance.”
“Oh, and that’s it, is it? What, like a hunch?”
“Yes,” I say tightly, “like a hunch. What about the psychiatrist, Graves? Or have you already had a chat with him, too?”
“No,” Ellis says with heavy false patience, “I haven’t. He’s next.”
If Mark Devlin could see what Catherine was capable of, then surely Graves could, too.
But Ellis won’t know what questions to ask. And I can’t risk telling him what I know. I can’t have Ellis running on ahead of me—I can’t risk him finding out what’s behind all this before I do, and especially I can’t risk him lighting on a trail that leads back to Johanssen.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m coming with you.”
Ellis says, “You’re what?”
After I’ve got him off the line I go back into the main room, to the big windows overlooking the dock and the office blocks.
Up here I’m safe—separate, isolated, looking down on everyone else. But now I’m going, in the company of a copper, in broad daylight, to interview an expert witness. You must be mad.
Isn’t that why I brought Craigie in, thirteen months ago? To keep myself away from all this? To keep myself safe?
One mistake and it could all unravel. Still, I’m going.
I feel as if I’m one of Dr. Gallagher’s cases and I’ve just been woken from a drug-induced coma. I’m not going back to sleep just yet.
DAY 15: WEDNESDAY–DAY 16: THURSDAY
JOHANSSEN
Wednesday night: another night spent cleaning and strapping and splinting, pumping chests, breaking up fights. Riley runs triage. Drill pads around the room, eyes wide and empty, barely speaking, never engaging with anyone. Vinnie fetches and mops up; he’s still talking about getting out.
Two dead tonight: a heart attack and a suicide—the
last, a young woman whose skin was riddled with old track marks. She’d opened her wrists. She died just inside the clinic door, a snapshot of a brown-eyed toddler in her slack fingers. Cate’s eyes have a flat hard light in them, and Riley’s watching her too much.
Riley, standing outside the clinic as the morning ambulances pull away—smoking steadily, remorselessly, eyes dead ahead—says, “She was a mess when I found her. Complete mess.
“It’s what happens with the girls especially, they come in here, they don’t always know what’s what, where’s safe. It was night, gates closed, patrols all tucked up indoors, and there she was just wandering around, out of it …” He shakes his head. “First I thought someone had messed with her, but it wasn’t that. It was something else … like, psychological. I dunno.”
Riley turns to his cigarette again, takes a drag.
“Anyway, couldn’t leave her, not like that. I was in with Quillan so I brought her here. Stuck her in a room, looked after her, kept the nutters off her … She didn’t snap out of it. Weeks, it went on for. Wasn’t talking, wasn’t hardly eating. Sitting there with this look on her face. Christ knows what had happened to her.
“I asked around. Went up to the Women’s Area, even got a couple of the girls to come down and take a look at her … Nothing. No one knew her. It’s like she’d just popped up out of nowhere.”
“Quillan ask the screws?”
It’s the first thing he’s said, and Riley gives him a sharp sidelong glance, as if the question isn’t his to ask. “If he did, he’s never said.
“Then one night they brought a bloke in, one of Quillan’s. Someone’d swung at him with a metal post, crushed his throat, the guy’s blue. Needed a tracheotomy, you know, hole in the windpipe, put a tube in, anything’ll do, ballpoint pen, anything. Years since I done one of them but it’s night, gates are closed, so I’ve got a blade and I’ve got my bit of pen and my hands are fucking shaking. And she’s there, and I’m about to make the cut and she goes, ‘No.’ And she takes the blade and she just does it, right there, makes the incision, puts the tube in, like it’s nothing, like she does it every day. Doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t say how she knows what to do, but two hours later she eats her first proper meal.
“Next night they bring in someone else, somebody’s mate. Word’s got round, see? And she starts to talk, about this guy, about how to treat him. Next day she asks for some paper. She makes a list: all the stuff we needed for this place. And she wants Quillan to get it all for her. Which he did, ’course, ’cos then he’s got his own private clinic.”
“Hearts and minds,” Johanssen says.
“Hearts and minds. But what the fuck, clinic kept her going. You seen the marks on the wall? She counts the ones she saves.” Then with another swift sideways glance: “You know why I just told you that? So you understand what she’s been through. You understand why your life’s worth precisely nothing, compared to hers. You got that?”
Johanssen nods.
For a moment Riley keeps on looking at him, as if there’s some test he has to pass … At last he turns away.
He says, “Cate thinks it’s like a penance. Why you’re working here. I don’t buy it. You’re a bit too steady for that. No, it’s like a purpose. Like a resolve. I can see that in you.”
“I told you, I’m—”
“Yeah, you’re making yourself useful, I got that. And you think it’s safer being under Quillan’s nose than somewhere out of sight, though you got that wrong.”
For a few moments after that neither of them speaks. Riley finishes one cigarette, lights another from the butt, treads the old one out.
Johanssen says, “She said she killed someone.”
“She tell you that?”
He nods.
“She tell you why?”
Johanssen shakes his head. “She tell you?”
Riley says, “She got called to some house, and there was this guy there, and she was supposed to be looking after him, but she killed him. That’s all I know.”
They both stare across the compound, toward the fence and the council block. Beyond the wire, a snatch crawls down the street.
Riley says softly, “You know what it’s like. You do something, and it fucks you up for a bit, and then you deal with it somehow, ’cos you have to. Like you did—because you did, didn’t you? Not her. With her it’s never stopped: she killed that guy once and she’s been killing him ever since.”
Later, when he comes down with his boots ready to go out, Cate’s in the clinic at her usual counter, cleaning surgical tools with a brutal, mechanical precision, her mouth tight and pinched.
He says, “I’m going out,” because it’s the only thing he can think of.
She doesn’t say a word.
Outside, Brice’s crew are waiting in the compound yard.
They’ve spotted him: Yellow Teeth sniggers and murmurs something that he doesn’t catch, and someone else laughs, but they don’t move to follow him. Maybe they’re waiting for Brice, gearing up for another day spent doing the rounds with Johanssen’s ID card: throwing their weight around, smacking heads, demanding a name.
He steps outside the gate. Twenty yards on, the tail slots into place.
When the time comes—when he leaves, with Cate beside him—they’ll try to follow. So today he looks for blind spots, for places where he can hide, lose them, double back.
After an hour he returns to the compound.
He’s pulling his boots off in the clinic when there’s a telltale prickling in his neck, and on instinct he looks toward the door to the waiting room. No one comes in, but the feeling doesn’t go. He has to open the door to the mortuary (damp stains, cardboard boxes, a few body bags), then the one to the side room. The metal cots are empty. He almost misses her.
She’s curled up fully dressed on a blanket in a corner, knees drawn up to her chest, arms embracing her shoulders, cuddling herself against the cold. She’s asleep.
In those few seconds he sees all the details. Every strand of her dirty-blond hair, the down on her cheek, the little pink half-moon at the base of her thumbnail. The dark shadows beneath her eyes, like bruises. Every individual eyelash.
He withdraws silently, without waking her.
Up in the bunk room he undresses, lies down.
You do something and it fucks you up for a bit and then you deal with it—
Eight years fold to nothing.
There were three of them in the car that picked him up that day, all Charlie Ross’s men. He knew they were going to visit someone called Cunliffe, though on the way there they mostly referred to him as “the Cunt” or—Sully thought he was being especially clever—“the Cunt of Monte Cristo.” “Cunt Dracula,” said another, and they were off: winding one another up, like football fans off to a local derby, ready for a bit of action.
He was an ordinary man, Cunliffe: forties and overweight, sweating into a cheap shirt on a sultry summer day, in an office with the name of a cab firm on the door. He was alone.
They put him in the car, wedged between Johanssen and another man. Cunliffe tried talking, then pleading, but no one answered, and he stopped.
The farmhouse was in the middle of nowhere. No cars in the yard, no livestock. The only machinery, a hay rake paralyzed by rust. They drove the car into one of the barns and pulled Cunliffe out—by now his shirt was sodden—and took him into the house.
They showed him the room with its plastic-sheeted floor, and he shat himself.
Sully and the other two took Cunliffe into the room and locked the door, leaving Johanssen in the corridor, on watch, and that’s where he stood for too long, listening as the pleading turned to screams, then something else, and telling himself, This is what your life is now, this is what you’ve got to be able to deal with, or they were right all along, weren’t they?
And knowing already that he was about to fail.
When finally he broke through the door, the thing on the sheeted floor, the mess of meat that used
to be Terry Cunliffe, was still moving, in reflex jerks, a sound gurgling in its throat. Sully and the other two were dressed in disposable paper suits, white spattered with red. It took him seconds to realize that the thing that Sully was holding was Cunliffe’s skin.
Sully looked up in surprise—he must have assumed there was trouble, that Johanssen had come to raise the alarm. He didn’t think to use the knife in his hand until it was too late.
Johanssen stopped when the three were bloody pulp.
And then Cunliffe—
Do something. Do something, you’ve been trained. But not for this.
The police found Cunliffe’s body three days later, dumped in a field: a message to Quillan, who retaliated. Sully and the other two were caught, tortured, killed.
From a pay phone, Johanssen rang the Scouser who’d given his name to Sully in the first place. Out of guilt, perhaps, the man gave him a phone number—They’re supposed to help people disappear but it’ll cost all you’ve got, now don’t call me again, ever—and that number brought Johanssen to a bare room and a bright light and a woman’s calm voice: You have to tell us everything. Complete disclosure is vital. Karla, but he didn’t know her then: all he knew was that he had a price on his head, that the man who wrote Unreliable in his file had been right, and that what remained of his life as Simon Johanssen wasn’t worth keeping.
It was months before he worked out what went wrong, what the trigger was. And it was Cunliffe. Cunliffe, standing in the hallway of the farmhouse, when they opened the door to the room and he saw the plastic sheeting, and shat himself—the spreading stain in the man’s trousers, and the smell. That was it: the tiny detail that you don’t want to see, or it will get its hooks into you. The tiny detail that makes them human.
Eight years since then. How many jobs? More memories tumble out, though these are bright, compressed, fleeting, like a handful of snapshots thrown across a room. An arc of tracer in a desert sky. The corpse of a man in an African street with a snake trail of blood winding through the dust behind him. The moment when a skull explodes. Somewhere behind them there’s a figure, a total that he can get to if he wants …
The Distance: A Thriller Page 20