by Nicci French
“What did you say?”
He flicked something I couldn’t see off his shorts. “I must have said something about how she always looked beautiful to me, but I can’t remember the exact words.”
“So, there was nothing different about her, or your relationship with her?”
He spoke now as if he were waking from a deep sleep. “Different? I don’t know what you’re digging for. Do you think this was something to do with me? Or her? She wasn’t depressed. She didn’t drink. She didn’t take drugs. She didn’t wander round Kersey Town like that girl…”
“Lianne.”
“Yes. She got up in the morning and made me breakfast. She looked after the house. She looked after Emily. She met friends. She was happy. She talked about when she should return to work. She talked about having more children one day. Soon.” His voice cracked slightly, but he went on, “Then, one morning, after she had made breakfast and tidied up the house, she went out with her child and she was suddenly murdered. End of story. That’s what the police think anyway, and so does that other doctor who’s been round here asking questions. If you’ve got reasons for thinking differently, please tell me what they are. I want to know.”
I stood up. “I’m sorry to distress you.” I stooped down and picked up the clump of moss, the two stones, the plastic tube. “Is it OK if I take these to Emily?”
“She’ll probably be in her bedroom. Top of the first flight of stairs.”
“Thanks.”
__________
She was arranging small plastic animals on a shelf. I squatted beside her with my hands cupped. “Here are your things.”
“Do elephants go with lions or horses?”
“If it were up to me, I’d put them with the lions. Do you want to show me what you’ve collected for your mother?”
She stood up and crossed over to her bed where she pulled out a large cardboard box. One by one, she placed things on the floor: a small jam-jar, a thistle head, several cards from cereal packets, three buttons, a string of plastic beads, a marble, a small shred of orange silken material, some spangled wrapping-paper, a chipped china dog, an apple. I watched her face. She was perfectly intent on her task.
“Which is your favorite?”
She pointed at the marble.
“Which would your mother have liked?”
She hesitated, then pointed at the orange rag.
The door opened and Philippa’s mother put her head round the door.
“Excuse me,” she said, in her firm, pleasant voice, “but a friend is due to arrive for Emily any minute.” She made me feel as if I had sneaked in under false pretenses.
“Of course.” I put the objects I was holding carefully into the cardboard box. “’Bye, Emily.”
“And the shell,” she said, not looking up. “The shell’s pretty. She liked pretty things.”
__________
Albie phoned up. He just wanted to say hello, he said. He just wanted to see how I was getting on. I held the phone carefully, as if it could hurt me, and waited. We waited for the other person to say something. Then we both said goodbye politely.
I phoned my father but he wasn’t there. I wanted someone to say to me, “Life can be hard, but don’t worry, my darling, everything is going to be all right.” I wanted someone to hug me tight and stroke my hair. I wanted my mother. Ridiculous, but true. Would it never go away, that feeling? Would I miss my mother for my whole life, not a day going by without missing her? I picked up the phone to ring Will. It was so quiet in my flat that I could hear my watch ticking on my wrist and my heart beating, and the occasional rattle of dry leaves in the trees outside. But I didn’t ring him. What would I say? “I’m on my own, come round and hold me, please”?
I poured myself a glass of wine and lit two candles. Then I turned off the light and sat on the sofa. Somewhere, a mosquito whined in the half-darkness. Outside it began to rain again and the wind sighed in the trees. What did I know about him? Nothing, except he’d given up a top job in the City to run a hostel for homeless young people who’d fallen through all the safety-nets; that the police distrusted him and suspected him of allowing drugs to be sold on his premises; that he was sour and ill-humored and dark. I wanted him now because he was so unlike ebullient Albie, and because he looked like a crow, a solitary bird. I wanted to wrap myself up in his ragged misery and make us both better.
__________
In the end I didn’t have to seek out Will because he came to me. The following night, when I had already gone to bed after a busy day, the doorbell rang. I pulled on my dressing-gown and looked at my watch. It was past midnight: probably Julie had forgotten her key again. I stumbled to the door, still tangled up in strange dreams. He was standing there and when he saw me he gave a kind of shrug. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
I stood back and he went up the stairs in front of me. He sat on the sofa, and I poured out a tumbler of whiskey for him, and a smaller one for me. I was very conscious of my tousled hair and tatty dressing-gown. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. He seemed so big and alien in my flat. How had I ever dared to kiss him, or to dream of him? We sat and sipped our drinks. He hadn’t even taken off his coat, and he stared into the glass as if it held some answer.
In the end, I made a move, because I couldn’t bear to go on sitting there in the gloom and heavy silence. I crossed over to the sofa, and I leaned down toward him. I didn’t kiss him: that would have seemed too intimate. I undid the buttons on his coat, and then on his shirt and he lay back with his pale torso gleaming and his eyes closed, while I touched him with tentative hands, and watched him. He put up his hands and held my face blindly and I sat astride him, pulled open my dressing gown and pressed his head against my breast, listening to the hammering of my heart. “You should be careful,” he muttered.
I didn’t know what he was talking about; I didn’t care. We were just strangers, in need of comfort. Outside, the rain was blown in waves against the window.
25
As soon as the phone rang, it felt like the wrong time. It was dark outside. My eyelids felt glued together. How long had I been asleep? I was in my own bed but it felt strange. I was in an unusual part of the bed, to one side: Albie’s side. As I reached across I realized with an ache in my stomach that I was alone. Will had gone.
“Yes?” was all I could manage.
“Is that Kit?”
“Who’s this?”
“Furth. You all right?”
“What?” I said stupidly. “Sorry, you just woke me up.”
“There’s a car on the way to fetch you. Can you manage that?”
“What for?”
“The boss says he’ll see you at the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
There was a pause.
“What’s it matter what hospital?”
“Don’t know. What’s happened?”
“Haven’t time. We’ll fill you in when you get here. Can you manage that? Or shall I say you can’t come?”
My brain was coming to life now, though slowly, like a lizard sitting on a stone in the morning sun. I was able to think. For example, I could now see that Furth was hoping I would say grumpily that I was too tired and slam down the phone.
“No problem,” I said. “Where do we meet?”
“The driver knows,” Furth said, and the line went dead.
The car was on its way. I had only a couple of minutes. I ran into the shower, switched the water on very cold and allowed myself to think about Will, the way we’d held each other like two drowning swimmers. Which one was dragging the other down? What the fuck had it all been about? Why had he gone like that, like a thief ? I turned the shower to very hot so it stung my skin. I thought of his expression as he’d come inside me, almost a sob, the closeness I’d been without for so long. Then I’d come as well, just from the look of him, I’d felt. He had held me so close that I had been scared and now he was gone. Was that it? Well, I thought. Well what?
“Work.” I said. “Something seems to have come up. Don’t know what.”
“God,” she said. “Sounds important.”
“Don’t know. Someone just phoned.” I still didn’t feel awake enough to formulate complex sentences.
“You want some coffee?”
“I don’t think there’s time. A car’s on its way to pick me up.”
Julie gave a smile. “I heard you had company.”
“Who from?”
“No, I mean I heard. Through the wall.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Julie…”
“No, no,” she said. “There was nothing I could do about it. It’s the walls. They’re like paper.”
I felt myself go very red. “Well, that’s very embarrassing. I’m sorry if I kept you awake. I thought you were out.”
“Well, I came in again. But don’t be sorry, I was glad. You deserve some fun.”
“It wasn’t exactly fun,” I said, feeling in some deranged way like Julie’s prudish elderly relative.
“Really?” she said, her expression changing to one of concern. “Well, it sounded fun. Who was the guy?”
I gave a huffy sort of deep breath. “As it happens it was Will. You know, Will Pavic.”
“Christ,” she said. “That’s weird. I mean great. Pavic. God. Is he awake?”
“No. Actually he’s gone, as a matter of fact.”
“Gone? Right. Will Pavic. That’s incredible. When you get back, I want to hear every single detail.”
“Julie! One, I’m not going to tell you every detail. And two, you seem to know everything already.” There was a ring at the door. In the quiet of two thirty A.M. it sounded like a fire alarm. “And three. I’ve got to go.”
As I walked out, Julie was saying, “Will Pavic. That’s great. It’s fantastic. But isn’t he a bit strange?”
I just shook my head and left. The car outside looked like a minicab. A man in a suit was holding the front passenger door open.
“Dr. Quinn?” he said.
“You’re taking me to see DCI Oban?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m just dropping you at St. Edmund’s.”
“Fine.”
As we set off I asked him if he knew what this was about. When he said he didn’t, I stayed silent and just looked out of the window. It was the dead time of night, but London never really went quiet. There were newspaper vans, the occasional car, people walking purposefully, the leftovers from yesterday mixing with the people preparing for tomorrow. I felt that my pulse was starting to race. I worked through alternatives in my mind. Another murder. An arrest. What else could be important enough for this?
“You a real doctor?” the driver asked.
“Sort of.”
“Know people at this hospital, do you?”
“Not at this time of night.”
The car pulled up outside the entrance to the casualty department of St. Edmund’s. A uniformed officer was standing outside like a doorman. As I got out of the car he muttered something into the radio on his lapel. It crackled something unintelligible back.
“I’m Kit Quinn,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take you up.”
I seem to have spent a lot of my life in the sort of places that never entirely close—airports, police stations, hospitals—and I rather like them for their slightly forlorn bustle that continues even when it is dark outside and good citizens are asleep. There were ambulances outside, a doctor and nurse ran past, there were cries from various directions. A pale young woman in a white coat was sitting in a corner drinking coffee and eating a mangy-looking sandwich while somehow attempting to fill in a form. Work was being done. The officer led me past all that, up some stairs and along a corridor. From a good fifty yards away I could see Oban sitting on a bench. He caught sight of me too early and we had that embarrassing hiatus where we were too far away to speak, so he nodded at me, then pretended to inspect his nails as if there was something urgent and fascinating about them, and then he looked back up at me.
I was intensely curious about his expression. Sad? Triumphant? But I couldn’t read it. He looked like a troubled relative waiting for news, an expectant but worried father. And he looked awful. Rumpled, unshaven, gray with fatigue. “Thanks for coming, Kit,” he muttered.
“So?” I said. “What is it? Another murder?”
“No,” he said, and with obvious effort he made an attempt at a smile. “I think I’ve won my bet with you. If it was a bet. I wish I felt better about it.”
“What bet?”
“I think I said something to the effect that our murderer was cruising around in his car and he would strike again when he had the chance. You were dubious. Now he has struck again. Or tried to.”
“What do you mean? Who have you got in here?”
“Ms. or Mrs., or whatever you call it, Bryony Teale. Aged thirty-four.”
“Is she badly injured?”
“Not physically. I’ve asked for a doctor to come and talk to you.”
“What happened?”
“Bryony Teale was walking along the canal this evening, silly girl. These people behave as if it were some country riverbank. She was approached and attacked by a man. But in the middle of it, two people stumbled on them on the towpath. The man fled. A car was heard driving away at speed.”
I was silent, thinking furiously. “Are you sure there’s a connection?”
“We’re working on it. But it was at the same spot, almost to the yard, where Lianne’s body was found. It seems compelling to me.”
“Bloody hell. And there were witnesses?”
“Two of them.”
“Did they get a description of the car?”
Oban shook his head gloomily. “That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? They were helping Bryony. Terrible state she was in.”
“Has she said anything?”
“Not yet. She’s terribly shocked. She can hardly speak.”
“So what am I doing here?”
“I want you to talk to her. Now, later, whenever she can talk. I want to see what you can get out of her. Hypnotize her, shine a light in her eyes, hold an object in front of her, anything, just find out what she knows.”
“Of course. But what about Seb?”
“It’s not his sort of job. Don’t worry. I’ll deal with Seb. And it would be better if it was a woman.”
“Dr. Quinn?”
I looked round. A doctor was standing next to me, a balding, very pale man of about my own age with a slightly resentful expression. Here we were, taking up space, time. He had the air of someone who had to be in two other places.
“Yes.”
“I’m Dr. Steen. Apparently you want to know about Bryony Teale here.” He looked at his clipboard. “She’s not my patient but I’ve checked her card. No injuries except some superficial bruising. She’s been suffering from shock, which is understandable. Dr. Lander just did the usual—rehydration, warming her up, keeping her under observation. She should be fine in the morning.”
“Has she got family? Has anybody been notified?”
Steen gave a shrug. “She’s not my patient,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Can I talk to her?”
He looked down at his clipboard helplessly, as if he expected it to tell him something. It didn’t. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may not be a good idea.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m used to patients like this. I won’t be intrusive.”
“OK,” he said. “The
re’s a nurse in there, I think. I’ve got to run.”
And he did.
“So,” I said, “shall I go in and see her?”
“For what it’s worth,” Oban said.
My hand had been on the door handle, but I stopped. “I don’t understand,” I said. “At least this is some kind of positive development in the case. We’ve got witnesses. Nobody has been killed. Why so gloomy?”
“I’m not exactly gloomy,” Oban said. “Just confused. And I don’t like it.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was one thing I didn’t mention.”
“What’s that?”
“Those two witnesses, the ones who saved Bryony.”
“Yes?”
“One of them was Mickey Doll.”
26
I would have liked to see my face.
“Doll?” I said stupidly. “Doll?” Oban stared glumly at me and nodded. “He was a witness again?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s…” I stopped. I didn’t know what to say or what to think.
“Yeah.”
“But why?”
“I’m working on it.”
There was a very long pause. I was incapable of movement or speech or thought. “So,” I finally managed, “I’d better talk to this woman.”
__________
The first thing that struck me was her hair, which was long and the color of ripe apricots. The second was her hands, clenched into fierce fists on the sheet that was pulled up over her. I went across to the bed, the duty nurse beside me—a huge woman who walked with a roll like a pitching ship, her shoes creaking loudly on the scuffed linoleum. “Don’t go distressing her now,” she said, and picked up one of the woman’s slim wrists in her enormous fingers and held it for a minute, head cocked on one side as if she was listening. Then she squeaked away again, and the door shut with a click behind her.
“Hello, Bryony,” I said, and she stared up at me as if I was indistinct to her. Her pupils were dilated. I pulled up a metal chair and sat down, noticing as I did so that I was wearing odd socks. “My name’s Kit.”