They had the turkey with the traditional roast potatoes and greens, though he took care not to overeat, wanted to have enough energy to fully explore her body. She seemed to have no such brakes, ate enthusiastically.
‘Slept in and didn’t have time for breakfast,’ she explained when she looked up and caught his eye.
‘I’m just glad that you aren’t one of those women who only eats beansprouts.’
‘Have you dated some of them?’
‘Only the once, needless to say! I pick up on mental health problems very quickly, steer clear.’
‘And I’ve passed your test?’
‘Top of the class.’
‘Not even the tiniest hint of neurosis?’
‘If you do have any, you’re hiding it well.’
But not as well as he was, he thought smugly. He was a master of disguise.
They’d had a pot of tea with the meal but now he suggested a drink in the adjacent lounge.
‘Personally, I like to sip a brandy at this point.’
‘Whisky for me, please,’ she said decisively.
‘It makes some of my patients violent.’
‘Oh, I’m packing a pistol in case some drunk gets out of hand,’ she murmured and they both smiled for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
She was genuinely funny as well as sexy, Adam thought, as he went up to the bar and bought the spirits. He felt almost mean as he put the date rape drug in her glass.
‘Here’s to life after dyspraxia,’ he said, joining her at the cosy table beside the real fire.
‘Here’s to life, full stop,’ Susie replied.
‘You seem so confident,’ he noted, thinking out loud.
‘I am in situations like this. It’s just when I have to deal with new streets, machinery, trains, buses – even something as simple as buying a new pair of shoes causes my esteem to plummet as I can’t tell which shoe fits which foot, frequently get it wrong.’
‘People who haven’t experienced it simply don’t understand,’ he said sympathetically and took a sip of his drink. He was pleased when she sipped hers too.
‘Oh, they’ve got these tins of macadamia nuts,’ she exclaimed, looking over at a display behind the bar. ‘I haven’t seen these for years – nowadays it’s invariably bagged ones. I used to buy the tins in Harrods all the time.’
‘Allow me.’ He bought her a tin and she opened it immediately, shook some into his hand.
An hour from now his hands would be full of her tits and ass. He pushed away the images for fear that he’d get an obvious erection.
‘Want any more?’ she asked softly.
He did, but he wasn’t thinking about the nuts. On the upside, they must have made her thirsty as she made serious inroads into her whisky. He matched her, so that they finished their drinks at the same time.
‘I love this song,’ he said, as ‘It’s My Life’ started up on the sound system. ‘Can you remember who sang it?’
He wanted to see if her memory had started to fade as the Rohypnol took effect.
‘Oh, it’s that band who specialize in stadium rock. You know, the one with the handsome lead singer.’
Good, that was sufficiently vague.
‘Shall we head off through the countryside?’ he murmured. ‘There are some beautiful views around here.’
‘Love to. I used to go walking with my husband on the Mendips.’
He took her arm, but she was still walking steadily. There again, she’d had a heavy meal so it would take longer for her digestive system to process the drug.
‘We could call into a cider shop on the way back,’ he offered. ‘Apparently it tastes best served from glass bottles so avoid these plastic ones which the supermarkets sell.’
‘Bon Jovi,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ He backed the car out of its space.
‘The group who sang that song. You couldn’t remember.’
‘That’s who it was,’ he said, amazed that her speech wasn’t even slightly slurred.
He drove, watching her with peripheral vision and listening carefully for verbal clues. Fuck it, she still wasn’t going under. He made a detour to the cider outlet and they tasted a pear cider and a new apple variety that they were trialling.
‘Do you want to go walking?’ he asked, desperate to prolong the date until she went under.
‘Usually I would – but I’ve had so much to eat that I’m really lethargic.’
‘Then let’s find a garden centre and have espresso to wake us up.’
‘Only if you let me pay this time. I’m not a freeloader.’
‘Of course,’ he said lightly, ‘I’m egalitarian.’
The centre was busy and they queued for ten minutes before being served with the two drinks. He noticed that she gripped the tray tightly and walked slowly. Was the Rohypnol kicking in at last? There again, this was typical behaviour for a dyspraxic as they were clumsy and accident prone.
‘So, are you seeing any patients today?’ she asked when they found a table.
‘No, I’m all yours for as long as you want me.’
‘Not for much longer, I’m afraid – my neighbour’s coming round at five to tighten something under the sink. It’s been dripping.’
‘I can do that for you.’ The last thing he wanted was some other man muscling in on the act.
She put her hand on his arm. ‘Oh, it’s OK. She offered first.’
Aha, so it was another woman. He wondered distractedly if she too was druggable.
‘Story of my life – surplus to requirements,’ he said.
‘I’m sure that’s not true. I suspect that you do very well with women.’
‘Oh, I’ve had my share of relationships, can’t lie about that. But I’m getting a bit too old to play the field.’
‘You’ve never been married?’
‘Yes, I have.’ He took a visible deep breath. ‘My wife was a lovely woman, but prone to depression. She was older than me and the menopause seemed to tip her over the edge. She took her own life by jumping from a multi-storey car park. It was a terrible shock.’
‘Was she one of your patients?’
Everyone asked him that.
‘God, no. She was a therapist, very well respected in the community. She hid her depression from me until sometime after we were married but apparently it had been there since puberty.’
‘I read somewhere that most mental illness is episodic.’
‘It is.’ To his surprise, he was actually enjoying this date as it gave him a chance to show off his considerable knowledge. ‘People cope until they’re faced with a specific amount of pressure and then their emotional health breaks down for a while. They regroup and all is well until the next crisis. I’ve found that a combination of exercise and behavioural modification can really help.’
‘Do many of your female patients come on to you?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. It goes with the territory. They might be widowed and lonely or they’ve recently been divorced and want to prove that they are still attractive. Others have come to see me because of sexual dysfunction and, in the process of describing their fantasies, they become aroused.’
‘What sort of fantasies?’
He told her a few of the more outlandish ones and she giggled. ‘You’re making these up!’
‘If only. A colleague of mine, Beth, works at the hospital and she gets to hear about the male patients who turn up at X-ray with vacuum cleaner hoses firmly embedded in their rectums. Needless to say, they all claim to have been vacuuming in the nude and to have fallen back on the hose.’
‘Did your wife deal with similar cases?’
No, she was too flaky for that. He bit back the words.
‘She wasn’t really in the psychosexual field – most of her patients were female as her form of therapy was more New Age, more esoteric.’
‘You don’t seem particularly New Age to me.’
‘I’m not.’ He only used candles when there was a power cut. �
�But it was a case of opposites attract.’
‘You didn’t win her over to your particular brand of therapy?’
‘Nor she to hers. We respected each other’s differences. Apart from the periods when she was down, we had an excellent relationship.’
‘I’ve heard that it takes years to recover from bereavement.’
‘You move on, but you never fully recover. I still miss her warmth, her sensitivity, her smile.’
‘She’s a hard act to replace.’
‘Very hard.’ He touched her arm briefly. ‘But I’m determined to give it my best shot and hope that you’ll come out with me again.’
‘I will.’
‘Good,’ he said and remained complimentary and upbeat on the journey home.
But he felt frustrated and cheated after he dropped her off, and angry that the drug had turned out to be a placebo. It was getting more and more difficult to buy reliable roofies on the black market – his own recent experience was that they either killed the victim or had no effect. He must research newer and stronger drugs and try them out on another homeless man or someone equally dispensable; with the right sedatives, Susie would be the proverbial putty in his hands the next time that they met.
FORTY-FIVE
They’d started to smell really bad, so he’d buried them in the back garden. Even with the excess energy that he’d had since going off his medication, it had taken hours and hours. Fortunately the neighbours on both sides were on holiday – they always travelled together and it had been a source of contention to his parents that they were never invited – so there was no one to notice as he dug through the night. He’d put them in separate holes as an additional punishment and had planted bushes from the DIY centre on top and also sprinkled grass seed, a variety which apparently grew exceptionally fast. He’d tell people that they’d gone to Spain to start a new life: he knew from the ads that he’d seen on the Internet that oldies did that all the time.
He could go to a local university now that he had no one to flee from. He was a house owner, a grown-up, totally free. All that he had to do was get rid of the paper trail which said that he was difficult and unreliable, or whatever negative words they’d used to define him. For starters, that meant burning down the school. He’d been thinking about it for the last few weeks but Mum and Dad had locked the door so that he couldn’t go out in the early hours, whereas now . . .
He went there at three a.m. with his petrol, rags and strategic map. He’d read up on arson attacks on some of the more revolutionary websites. You had to find combustible materials and not leave the premises until they were fully alight.
Now he could spend his life forever in blue jeans. Brandon broke a downstairs window with a half brick. It was easier than he’d thought: he felt fully alive and invincible. He slid his hand in, undid the catch and entered, glad that he was so slim. He knew the building well, made for the sewing room with its bails of fabric and skeins of wool, all advocating an olde worlde lifestyle. What was the point, when machines could produce clothes so much more quickly and effectively? The materials crackled as they caught alight and he stood, watching, for a while. Gotcha. But there was more to do, so he strode on to the art room with its paper and balsa wood, started another three small fires, exulting as they spread. Later he upped the ante by splashing the assembly room curtains with petrol, put a lit match to the hem and enjoyed seeing them burn.
His next port of call was the secretary’s room. How often had he stood outside it, waiting for yet another note to give to his parents? Tonight he was dexterous, managed to pick the lock. He took his file from the metal cabinet and read it with genuine interest, then put it on a fabric-covered chair and set it alight. There might be other report cards in individual teacher’s desks or in the staff room, but an inferno would destroy every one of them and it would be Mr Leston’s word against his. They might well keep computer files, backed up at a remote location, but he was still convinced that he was doing the right thing. They’d tried to mould him here, to turn him into an obedient, Shakespeare-memorizing machine, devoid of creativity. It was payback time.
When he’d started twenty serious fires (was there any other kind?) throughout the school, he left as quietly as he had arrived and walked swiftly home, fancying that he could smell burning in the air. If only it had included the scent of burning flesh and skin . . .
Later, as he played online chess throughout the night, he realized that he didn’t have to go to university at all. He’d only wanted to do so in order to escape the oldies. But now that they were pushing up the daisies – well, the special fast-growing grasses – he could just stay in the house for ever more. He could also . . . For a moment his imagination failed him. But that was alright: he’d come up with another good idea soon. He was intelligent and creative and would no longer have to listen to negative feedback. His folks had been so wrong when they said that he was too impulsive, didn’t think things through.
FORTY-SIX
‘So they’re arresting him within the hour.’
Olivia felt unwell as she took in the enormity of her colleague, Susie’s, words. Why had no one told her, until now, that they’d sent a second undercover cop to Adam’s? Were they aware that she’d become too close to him? Did they fear that she’d warn him that he was under surveillance at this ambitious woman’s hands?
In the two days since she’d last seen him, she had continued to feel second-rate, rejected. Now she felt bloated, having risen for this early morning emergency briefing at five a.m. Unused to getting up at this time, she’d been unable to open her bowels and the cereal that she’d forced down still felt like a brick in the pit of her stomach. She looked around the Major Incident Room at all of the expectant faces and realized that she was the only police officer who was unanimated, low.
She took a deep breath. ‘You mean he admitted to killing Helen?’
‘No, according to him they had a picture perfect marriage. No, he’s being arrested for attempting to drug me.’
‘Were you at his office at the time?’ When she, Olivia, had lain on his couch, he’d been the perfect gentleman. She’d had to make the first move, and he’d still hesitated, talked about professional boundaries. But she’d continued to flirt until his need for her kicked in.
‘I spent time at his office, but on this occasion we were in the pub. Obviously there were several plain clothes officers around for the entire journey. They tailed us in an unmarked car and others posed as diners and bar staff. I kept having to fight the urge to smile and wave.’
I kept fighting the urge to kiss him and then I gave in to it, Olivia thought, and felt a failure and ashamed.
‘He drugged your drink?’ She wondered briefly if her colleague had set him up, brought along her own sleeping draught. Just how ambitious was she, how determined to get a result?
‘He did, but we were proactive and had already arranged for me to swap my whisky for one being held by another officer. All that I had to do was distract him for a second so I sent him up to the bar to buy me nuts.’
‘And what had he put in your glass?’
‘Rohypnol – the guys took it away for analysis and we got the results back this morning. If I’d ingested it, I’d have been knocked out for several hours whilst he had his wicked way.’
Olivia belatedly became aware that Susie was waiting for a response. ‘It’ll be enough to shut down his practice,’ she said weakly, wondering if she would have to face him in court.
‘Exactly, and it’ll make it easier for us to lean on him again regarding his wife’s death. I mean, this proves that he’s immoral. And it puts him more firmly in the frame for Hannah and Kylie’s murders. He could have drugged them for sex and they had a bad reaction and died.’
She still didn’t like to think of him with other women; he’d made her feel as if they had a bond, a shared love of language and a similar sense of humour. She’d become young and sexy when she was with him, had felt as if all her early potential had been r
enewed.
‘He may have done the same to his lodger,’ Susie added. ‘You know, if he’s bisexual? We’ll see what we find in the way of porn and photos when we search his place.’
‘He seemed normal to me,’ Olivia said, feeling the urge to defend him. ‘Very likeable.’
Susie nodded. ‘Oh he’s charming, like most psychopaths.’
The other woman seemed to be waiting for a reaction. ‘So, when exactly are they arresting him?’
Susie rubbed the sleep from her eyes. ‘Within the next couple of hours, whilst he’s still in bed. They want the element of surprise.’
FORTY-SEVEN
He wished that his mum had stocked the fridge before she died – he was hungry and fast running out of money. He didn’t know her or Dad’s pin numbers and had spent the money in their wallet, purse and the little bowl in the kitchen where they kept the petty cash. How on earth was he supposed to feed himself or pay the broadband bills? There was no point going to his aunt’s house as she spent all her money on cheap vodka and cigarettes. Apparently she’d been even worse since the ostensibly accidental death of her son, Ethan. That surprised him – you’d have thought that she’d be more relaxed without the little brat around.
He’d stayed up all night again playing online games but now it was four a.m. and he had to eat. He belatedly thought of Adam. The man had always offered him wholesome snacks and fresh orange juice when he came straight from school for therapy. Now he could sneak in and take all of the food in the kitchen and go through the man’s filing cabinet until he found the information about himself. It probably also made sense to start another fire; if nothing else, it was fun.
It would be comparatively easy to enter the bungalow as the therapist kept the key on a little nail beside the door. Brandon spent a few minutes fashioning a long hook out of two metal coat hangers before leaving the house. He could see that the bushes over his mum and dad were wilting horribly and wondered vaguely if he should replace them with plastic ones. Dad had always brought home plants from the garden centre in his car but he, Brandon, would have to walk all the way there and carry them back and they’d be much heavier and more cumbersome than packets of grass seed. He hated buses, always felt singled out and trapped.
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