by Ed O'Connor
‘McInally called me at the hotel,’ she said crisply. ‘He said that you’d been in touch.’
‘I knew that he’d be concerned about you,’ Underwood replied.
‘I appreciate it,’ Dexter said quietly.
‘How much longer will you stay at the hotel?’ Underwood asked. ‘It’s safe to come home now.’
‘I know. It just doesn’t feel right yet.’
For the millionth time, her cold beauty drove an ice pick through his heart.
‘Everything is chugging along at the office anyway,’ Underwood volunteered eventually. ‘Harrison and I are tying up the Leonard Shaw case. We’ve certainly got enough to have Woollard and that hairy little bollock Keith Gwynne for conspiracy.’
‘What have they done with Garrod’s body?’ Dexter asked.
‘Leach has been handling the post-mortem. Frankly, my opinion is that they should have incinerated the bastard immediately but there is apparently a question of procedure. Some concern has been expressed at a high level about the way I handled the matter.’
‘How do you mean?’
Underwood took a sip of lemonade and pretended it was gin. ‘The Chief Super is unhappy that I shot Garrod three times. Unnecessary force he reckons. Given my psychiatric record, I can understand his concern.’
‘What a load of shit!’ Dexter snorted. ‘I’d have done the same thing. I will speak to the Chief Super on your behalf.’
‘You don’t owe me anything,’ Underwood replied.
‘Let’s not talk about that, John,’ Dexter said, trying to bury the contempt she felt for Underwood’s clandestine observation of her private life with the knowledge that without him she would undoubtedly be dead. ‘If you can assure me that stuff is all behind you, I am happy to give you the benefit of the doubt. John, since Julia left, you have had a terrible time of it. I can accept that your behaviour towards me is simply a product of that.’
Underwood struggled to find a form of words that would express his true emotions without confounding his position. ‘I feel a degree of responsibility towards you.’
‘I don’t need anyone to take responsibility for me.’
There was an edge to her voice now that unsettled him. Underwood knew that he had pushed Alison Dexter to the limits of her patience.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ Dexter asked him.
‘Go ahead.’
She looked uncomfortable, the memory of her humiliation pressing at the front of her brain. ‘How many people know about what happened?’
‘Only Harrison and myself know the full story,’ Underwood said. ‘I wrote the full report.’
‘I don’t want people gossiping about me,’ Dexter said quietly. ‘About the way you found me.’
‘I understand that.’ Underwood could see the shame in her eyes. It was upsetting.
‘I don’t want to become a dirty story for canteen coppers.’
‘My report is very sparse on that kind of detail. I stated that you were unconscious and tied up when we arrived. As I see it, beyond that you played no part in the proceedings.’
‘What happened to the camera that Braun was using?’ Dexter asked anxiously. ‘He took pictures of me.’
‘How angry would you be if I told you that I destroyed evidence from a crime scene?’ Underwood asked with a faint smile.
‘You destroyed it?’ Dexter asked suspiciously.
Underwood nodded. On the night of Garrod’s death, he had taken Henry Braun’s camera and Polaroid exposures from the kitchen floor at Craxten Fen Psychiatric Hospital. The camera had not been mentioned in his report. For a dark, sinking moment he had thought of keeping the pictures for himself. Then, disgusted by his own perversity, he had burned them and smashed up the camera. Somehow, he needed to scorch that particular infection from his mind.
‘I burned everything,’ he told her. ‘The whole lot.’
She looked hard into his eyes, seeking out some flicker of deceit, some hint that he was trying to fool her. She saw nothing.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply.
Underwood looked out of the window. ‘It’s stopped raining. Shall we go for a walk?’
Traffic splashed noisily up Trumpington Street. Underwood led Dexter down a side alley next to St Peter’s Terrace that led to the back of Peterhouse Deer Park. It was Underwood’s favourite college garden. Gravel crunched beneath them on the pathway.
‘Are we allowed in here?’ Dexter asked. ‘I can’t cope with some stroppy college porter throwing me off the premises.’
‘If they do, tell them we’ll come back with a warrant.’
They walked for a moment or two in silence. Birds squawked on the nearby Cam. The white bulk of the Fitzwilliam Museum loomed to their right. Underwood felt the pain nagging again in his chest. It drove him on.
‘Alison, your friendship is important to me,’ he said eventually. ‘I feel terrible that I’ve jeopardised that.’
‘We can be friends, John,’ Dexter said. ‘I can accept that.’
Underwood nodded. He still had a single card to play. However, raising the stakes was dangerous. He faced losing everything.
‘I took another liberty,’ he said. ‘When I spoke to McInally earlier in the week, I said that we’d have lunch with him.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. I know it’s short notice but he’s desperate to see you and since you’re on leave, I thought you might be glad of the company.’
Dexter thought about the last two weeks: the worst of her life. She thought of the shame she felt at the death of Kelsi Hensy, the fury she had focused on John Underwood, the terror she had felt as she hung naked in front of Henry Braun and Bartholomew Garrod. She was emotionally exhausted. But she was also tired of being alone.
‘Where are we meeting him?’ she asked.
‘London,’ Underwood said briskly. ‘I’ll pick you up from the hotel. I thought you might appreciate getting out of Cambridgeshire for an afternoon.’
‘Fair enough,’ Dexter nodded. ‘It’ll be good to see the old sod.’
As they approached the side of the old college, the crumbling stonework of its thirteenth-century hall loomed in front of them. Underwood had found their conversation unsatisfying. He had pushed Dexter as far as he dared. She had assured him of friendship and that at least was a cause of optimism. Was it enough?
Dexter turned and looked back across the gardens that they had just traversed. There was colour in her face, a blush of pink on her pale cheeks wrought by the cold Cambridgeshire air. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said softly.
Maybe that was enough.
Underwood left her in King’s Parade and headed for his car up on the third level of the Lion Yard car park. He drove south through the narrow crowded streets of the city towards Addenbrookes Hospital. He had cancelled his two previous appointments to see the oncology consultant. Fear and resignation had previously stopped Underwood from seeking treatment for the pain that was growing inside him. In the depths of his despair, he had seen the coming darkness as a blessed relief. Perhaps it would also be an opportunity to revenge himself upon the wife that had deserted him and the woman he had fallen in love with. Why then bother to seek diagnosis and treatment? Underwood had reasoned that his fear of dying was less than his fear of living on in desolation.
Now he had two reasons to stay alive. The first was his memory – all too vivid – of scrambling for freedom and air at the bottom of Oakley Creek. Death had stared him directly in the eye then and Underwood had blinked first. He remembered his desperate, writhing struggle to survive. His instinct had been to fight death not to passively accept his fate.
Secondly, his conversation with Alison Dexter that afternoon had given him a small measure of hope. She had – at least – assured him that there was a possibility of them remaining friends. That was something. The prospect of sharing lunches with Alison Dexter, of basking in the light of her fierce intelligence, of watching her skin blush red in the cold air were all powerful
incentives to survive.
Or were they? Underwood pulled up in a space near the main entrance of Addenbrookes Hospital. The immediacy of his situation unnerved him. He found his resolve faltering. His friendship with Dexter had been one of the factors that characterised his current state of affairs. Was her friendship – friendship from a distance – an adequate reason to stay alive? He suddenly doubted it. There is no emotion more debilitating than unrequited love. Underwood doubted that he could play the thwarted, melancholy hero of a tortuous courtly love poem. The ghosts of the future were gathering around him. He sensed his future self, wracked with cancer and loneliness, standing at the entrance to the hospital remembering the moment that he currently occupied. Nature had given him a way out: a way to shuffle into the darkness with dignity. He had the option of a comfortable death. Now, faced again with a straight choice, Underwood lapsed into indecision.
The car clock told him it was 3.04 p.m. He was already late for his appointment.
Underwood’s mind tried desperately to understand itself.
Alison Dexter walked through Cambridge town centre feeling strength and self-confidence slowly seeping back into her flesh. She had always found Cambridge a peculiar place. It always seemed so open and bleak: beautiful in its desolation. She thought King’s College Chapel was the most dramatically desolate building she had ever seen: a construction desperately trying to outreach its own ugliness and touch beauty.
She had touched beauty. Kelsi Hensy had been beautiful. In the heat of their passion, Dexter had momentarily outreached her mental ugliness; exceeded the ordinariness of existence. And yet, the ghosts of her past had desecrated that beauty. She headed up King’s Parade towards the market square. Was she wrong to blame herself? Had Bartholomew Garrod merely been the manifestation of all the ugliness within her? He was a remnant of the life she had tried to run away from. Undoubtedly, the man was a monster but Dexter kept coming back to the same conclusion. If Kelsi Hensy had never met her, she would still be alive. That made the disaster hers alone. It was a responsibility she would have to accept and carry with her.
The market square teemed with people. Students, townies and tourists perused the stalls. Dexter found herself drifting through the crowd. The energy and chatter, movement and laughter, reminded her that chaotically and painfully, mundane and beautiful, life goes on. Garrod was dead. The memory of her capture and humiliation would live with her but memories were manageable. Even Underwood was now showing flashes of sanity that were almost endearing.
Almost.
She was in front of a meat stall. The sight of dead flesh made her immediately want to wretch. Dexter was about to walk away when she saw the teenage boy sitting at the side of the stool eating a sandwich. She stared at him. Something was unsettling her.
‘Can I help you, love?’ Jack Chissel asked. As he spoke a piece of pig kidney fell out of his mouth and on to his apron.
‘What are you eating?’ she asked.
‘It’s called “Pig’s Fry”, darling,’ came the greasy response. ‘You want some?’
The market swam around her; the noise receded and then welled up into a terrible scream. Dexter felt Garrod’s presence suddenly at the front of her mind; his hands pulling her guts from her stomach, his teeth tearing the flesh from her bones; the grease of her body smeared on his lips; the machinery of her body stripped and dismantled; the monstrousness of the world she had chosen to inhabit.
She suddenly, inexplicably, missed John Underwood.
77.
Wednesday, 30th October 2002
Underwood collected Alison Dexter from the Cambridge Holiday Inn, and headed towards the M11 just outside Cambridge. He drove them south towards London, eventually leaving the motorway at junction four. The grey complexities of London unwound around them. Dexter began to recognise the roads as they drove through Wanstead towards Leyton.
They met DCI Paddy McInally at Leyton CID. He drove them down to the Blind Beggar on the Mile End Road. Underwood found McInally excellent company. The man’s profoundly filthy sense of humour had him laughing into his pint glass. Dexter seemed to be enjoying herself too. Underwood noticed that her voice and manner had changed slightly. Maybe it was the presence of her former boss, more likely it was the effect of being in London. The city had an energy, a tension that Cambridgeshire lacked. Dexter was back in her natural habitat.
McInally took an enormous swig of London Pride beer and launched into another joke.
‘Here’s one for you, Dexy,’ he spluttered. ‘There’s this poof in the back of a squad car, right?’
Dexter rolled her eyes. ‘Right,’ she said with mock weariness.
McInally grinned. ‘So the copper asks him “Have you ever been picked up by the fuzz before?” And the poof says, “no but I’ve been swung around by me bollocks.”’
He laughed uproariously.
‘Isn’t that called a “Hampstead Handshake?”’ Dexter replied.
Underwood listened enviously to the exchange between his two colleagues. He had rarely enjoyed any banter with Dexter. There was a warmth between her and McInally that he could never hope to replicate. Now Garrod was out of the picture, Underwood feared the worst. McInally seemed to anticipate his concern.
‘Look, I have an ulterior motive for bringing you down here today, Dexy. I mentioned it to John on the phone the other night.’
‘I knew that if you were buying there had to be a catch,’ Dexter shot back. ‘Let’s have it then.’
McInally looked over at Underwood who was staring intently into his pint glass. ‘An opening has come up here in Leyton.’
‘What sort of opening?’ Dexter asked suspiciously.
‘I’m taking early retirement,’ McInally continued. ‘That means there’s a DCI job going. You’ve got local knowledge. I could recommend that you replace me.’
Underwood shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He tried to smile but could not look Dexter in the eye. He knew this was coming but it still made his guts churn horribly.
‘I don’t know,’ Dexter responded. ‘It’s a huge job.’
‘You’re going to get upped sooner or later,’ McInally said. ‘This could be the opportunity. You’re a London girl, you even know some of the villains we deal with. I can’t think of anybody better.’
The ground opened up in front of Underwood. His saw the long, twisting slide to Hell.
‘Besides, you’ve got the energy, Dexy,’ McInally continued. ‘I’ve let things sink a little bit over the last year or two. This department needs a pocket battleship.’
Dexter watched Underwood’s expression carefully. The man was staring at the carpet now. Only his drumming fingers betrayed his inner turmoil.
‘I don’t know, Paddy,’ Dexter said. ‘I’d have to think about it, but thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank old Johnny boy here.’
Dexter’s shock was profound. ‘This was your idea?’ she asked Underwood.
‘I know you’ve been unhappy,’ Underwood replied. ‘When Paddy told me he was thinking of packing it in, I thought of you.’
Dexter was unsure whether to be angry or grateful at Underwood’s latest intervention in her life. The prospect of returning to London was an alluring one. She had always found Cambridgeshire desperately empty: at least, until recently. There was an obvious logic to her replacing McInally. She was his protégée but she had been away from the area long enough to be apolitical. That would make her an attractive candidate. It was tempting. In London she could rebuild an infrastructure to support her. Why then was she not jumping all over McInally’s offer?
An hour later McInally said goodbye to Underwood and Dexter outside Leyton police station. Dexter promised to call him the following day with a response. Underwood began to weave his way through London traffic.
‘So that was your idea then, John?’ Dexter said eventually.
He nodded. Despair was eating at his soul.
‘You would be happy for me to leave?’
‘I wouldn’t be happy at all,’ he said. ‘But that’s not really the point is it?’
‘The point is that you are prepared for me to leave,’ Dexter said.
‘You are a London girl, Alison. Always will be.’
‘You know something, John. You are the only person that calls me Alison.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Dexter corrected him. ‘You heard McInally back there. To him I’m always “Dexy” or even “Sexy Dexy” for God’s sake. The people in the office all call me “Dexter”, “Guv” or worse. Kelsi Hensy called me “Ali”. I’m tired of people reshaping me into a form that makes me manageable, palatable to them.’
‘I don’t see your point.’ Underwood frowned.
‘My name is Alison,’ she said. ‘But only two people have ever called me that. You’re one of them.’
Underwood’s emotions tore at him. Dexter was speaking in code. She still was oblivious to the fact that he had discovered and befriended her father: the man that she hadn’t seen for over twenty years was lying in a hospital bed not two miles from their current location. Had she suffered enough? Could he bear to inflict more pain on the woman he loved? He saw no answer to his dilemma on the chaotic London streets or the patterns of dirt on his windscreen.
‘Do you ever think about him? Your dad, I mean?’ he asked tentatively.
‘Sometimes. My memory of him is vague though. I try not to dwell on it. If he was interested in me he’d have stayed in touch.’
Underwood turned towards Leytonstone.
‘What if he thought it was in your best interests that he stay away?’ he said.
‘I’d say that the only person who should decide my best interests is me.’
‘Supposing he was a criminal,’ Underwood speculated, ‘an armed robber or something. Getting in contact with you might damage your career. If he loved you he might stay out of the picture.’