Cold Heart (50 page)

The girls sat in awed silence. The bandaged woman in front of them was a stranger, and they didn’t know what to say to her. When Mike encouraged Sally to touch her mother’s hand she wouldn’t, whispering that she was too frightened.

The doctors and all the staff were kind and thoughtful, suggesting to the girls that although their mother could not respond, they should talk to her to let her hear their voices. The girls looked at each other. Hearing this woman called their mother felt wrong, and Julia began to cry, saying she wanted to go home.

Two weeks passed slowly and the number of tubes attached to Lorraine’s body gradually diminished. More tests to determine brain damage had been done, but she remained in a coma. The healing process of the external damage had been rapid though: she no longer looked like a monster for the terrible bruising to her face was fading and the bandages were removed.

The girls came regularly now, and the more they got used to seeing her, the more freely they chatted about ordinary, girlish things. They never called her Mom, but Sally often touched her hand, and Julia stroked her mother’s pale arm. Both girls wore the bracelets she had chosen for them.

Rosie and Rooney divided their visiting time between them, and talked and talked, never giving up hope of a response. Jake came before and after work, spending hours sitting beside her, planning their wedding. He brought the ring he had bought for her, and asked her if he could put it on her wedding finger.

Christmas was now a week away, and Lorraine was still in a coma, her eyes closed, as if she was sleeping. The ventilator tube had been moved from her mouth to pass through a tracheotomy incision in her neck, and there was hope, hope that none had believed possible. She remained in the intensive care unit, as she still needed to be monitored round the clock. She was dressed now in her own nightclothes, and Rosie combed her hair and cared for her. She read magazines and books to Lorraine, played music tapes, and when she was through, Rooney took over. He talked for hours, all about his old work, and found it quite therapeutic to chat to Lorraine, asking her if she recalled this or that case.

Jake would take over from him, and sat holding her hand, willing her to acknowledge him. He brought fresh bouquets every other day, unable to bear the sight of flowers wilting, always insisting that fresh ones replaced them. Like Rooney, he talked about his work, discussing things with her as if she was replying. When it got to week eight, everyone was tired – and angry that Lorraine was still a prisoner in some alien world. She looked almost like herself – and yet she wasn’t there. Rosie had brought in a small artificial Christmas tree and had decorated it with baubles and ribbons. Small gifts for the nurses were arranged beneath it, all bearing tags: ‘Happy Christmas, with love from Lorraine.’

The first time she heard his voice was at the moment he had put the ring on her finger. She had started talking to him, saying how happy she was, and asking him why he didn’t reply to her questions. It was frightening that she could hear them talking to her but they couldn’t hear her.

The visits were the worst, when they seemed to ignore what she was saying, talking at her, not to her, not hearing when she called their names. Then she listened intently, and realized that the high-pitched chattering voices she had been hearing day after day belonged to her daughters, talking about what they wanted for Christmas. She wanted to cry with happiness that they were there with her – but
why
couldn’t they hear what she was saying? She could hear Mike, and told him how pleased she was that he had brought the girls, asked him if he had met Jake. She asked so many questions, and sometimes she laughed at what they were saying, especially old Bill Rooney, forever droning on about some case he knew he should have beaten, then complaining that Tiger had chewed up his best sweater. Her visitors came and went, not hearing her answers, her voice, and when it was night she wept, because it felt as if she would never see them again, and she couldn’t understand what had happened, or where she was. She started to be strict with herself, telling herself to pull herself together, that she had to straighten out. Crying every night was not doing any good: it was just using up all her energy, and she had to start thinking about other things. She forced her brain to be active, even though it hurt to think – yet she had to do something.

Lorraine felt as if she was gritting her teeth with determination, that if she could just get through the pain barrier her mind had erected, then she was sure she would be able to see again, see her loved ones. She told herself that she was having a nightmare, that she’d wake up soon, but that she had to make herself do it by retaining a mental connection with her active, waking self and her life, and convince herself that she would soon be coming back to them.

Worst of all were those silent night hours when all she heard was the clatter of things around her, the alien whispers, sounds that reminded her of a hospital, and her mind drifted back to the last time she had been in a hospital, when she’d had the plastic surgery on her cheek to get rid of the scar in an expensive private establishment. She made herself visualize the place, taking herself on a tour of her room, the corridors, the television lounge, the day room, the other patients.

Lorraine had had no visitors then – no one had even known she was undergoing surgery – so she spent many hours alone in the sunny, comfortable TV lounge, not that she had ever had much interest in television but this was the only room in which patients were allowed to smoke, and she had passed the time by watching the others, playing detective as to their real ages and backgrounds.

Most were women between forty and sixty, and some had already had so much surgery that at first sight they looked much younger, but there was always some incongruity between their faces, uniformly taut, tanned, slightly android-looking, and the way they dressed, moved or, most noticeably, spoke, that betrayed their real age. There were other dead giveaways too: the slight slackening of skin tone on the under surface of the arm that no amount of exercise could firm, plus, of course, the hands and feet. There were a couple of veritable Zsa Zsa Gabor lookalikes, dyed blonde hair piled up, stretched and lifted faces that could have passed for mid-forties, but with the liver-spotted hands, thickened knuckles and prominent tendons of old age. Only a lucky few seemed to escape
that
tell-tale sign of time’s passing. There had been a woman in a wheelchair, wearing dark glasses and still bandaged so that virtually none of her face could be seen. Lorraine had assumed, from the few visible strands of white hair, that she must be in her sixties or seventies, but she had noticed that the woman’s large, fine, restless hands were those of someone much younger, conveying an unusual impression of simultaneous flexibility and strength. She remembered noting how short the nails were cut, and had thought at the time that the woman must use her hands – perhaps as a musician or, at her age, a music teacher – which would explain how they had escaped shrivelling into an old lady’s claws. Now she knew that the woman was no musician, no teacher, and no old lady: it had been Sonja Nathan, she would have taken an oath on it.

The woman had kept herself to herself, only coming into the TV lounge once and taking no part in any of the casual conversations that were going on around her. Lorraine had thought, though, that she had seemed to pay attention when she herself had revealed to a chatty lady who worked for a real estate company that she was a private detective – they had commented quietly that they seemed to be in a minority here of working women: most of their fellow patients were pampered wives. When Lorraine had said she might be looking to rent a new office shortly, the woman had insisted on knowing Lorraine’s full name and the name of her company, Lorraine remembered, and she remembered, too, how she had thought of trying to draw the bandaged woman into their conversation, but some separateness and aloofness in her demeanour had deterred her from doing so. It was that indefinable
froideur
, as much as anything in Sonja Nathan’s physical appearance, that now made Lorraine certain it had been her.

Sonja Nathan had left the clinic knowing exactly who Lorraine was and, weeks later, had been able to recall those details.

Sonja had said that she had not been in Los Angeles at all for the previous year. That was a lie, and Lorraine was positive now that Sonja had also lied when she had said she had not made the call to Lorraine’s office on the morning of the murder. Lorraine already had documentary evidence – presumably lying in her apartment, she thought, in her briefcase – that Sonja and Harry Nathan were in contact after their divorce. Now she had the last piece of the jigsaw: proof that Sonja Nathan had been in LA the day her ex-husband was killed. She was sure now that if she ever got out of this goddamn hospital and was able to get voice experts to analyse the recording Decker had made of the call which had to be somewhere on that tape, they could identify some feature of Sonja’s mid-Atlantic, faintly European accent. That would be the final link and would put the woman behind bars.

It was painful to drag up each memory, worse than any headache she had ever known. The pain was excruciating, but Lorraine wouldn’t, couldn’t stop. Now everything had fallen into place, and Lorraine understood Sonja’s odd concern about Cindy, her saying that she wished she had given her more time – ‘or assistance’. Sonja’s lack of interest in the fact that so much money was missing from the estate had also seemed strange – but not, Lorraine thought wryly, when one knew that the assets had been taken
before
the bizarre sequence of events that had left Sonja, ironically, Harry Nathan’s legitimate heir.

Sonja Nathan knew the house, the gardens, and more than likely her ex-husband’s routine – or she could readily have arranged to meet him in advance. Sonja was clearly capable of premeditation, as she must deliberately have hired a jeep identical to Kendall’s to conceal her comings and goings at Nathan’s house – perhaps she had even hoped to incriminate Kendall, Lorraine thought, and she had managed to take every nickel of the woman’s money through the art fraud. Even if Kendall’s death really had been accidental, Sonja bore some indirect responsibility, as it had been after realizing that she had lost her stake in the paintings that Kendall had been tempted to try to burn down the gallery for the insurance. That must have given Sonja considerable satisfaction, Lorraine thought, for, as Arthur had said, she was all too human – or inhuman – under the cool, superior façade, and had clearly hated Kendall as intensely as she had ever loved Nathan.

As for the paintings, Lorraine now knew that Harry Nathan had been to Germany, to make preparations for the sale of the real works of art, and she was sure, too, that once she got out of here and could get to Berlin, she could find out exactly how Sonja and Arthur, the expert copier, had stepped into Nathan’s shoes and netted the proceeds of sale.

Lorraine’s head throbbed, but she carried on, piecing the jigsaw together. All the dead faces floated in front of her – Harry Nathan, Cindy, Kendall, Vallance – faded, and then became clearer, but her concentration was wavering like a guttering torch. It was on Vallance’s death that she tried to shed the last of its light. Lorraine knew now how Sonja had killed him – or made him kill himself – by threatening to release the porn videos, the murder weapon Jake Burton had innocently sent her. Sonja could not, of course, be made to bear legal responsibility for that murder, or for Cindy’s death, for which she was also morally responsible: Vallance had strangled his former mistress, believing mistakenly that she, not Sonja, had killed the man he had idolized and lusted after all his life. Christ, Lorraine thought, that this should be the woman to whom she had poured out her own most private griefs to turn Sonja’s mind from suicide – but once she got out of here . . . The faces blurred and parts of the conversations she was trying to recall began to crackle and echo in Lorraine’s brain. The pain grew worse and worse: she was losing her grip, unable to think any more. She screamed in agony, as if a red-hot iron were forging up from her spine, blinding her, exhausting her, and she couldn’t take it any more.

Rooney went pale. Even though he was outside Intensive Care, on his way to see Lorraine, he knew something had happened. Nurses and doctors, running as if for their own lives, entered the unit, and the curtains were drawn across the viewing window. Lorraine was shielded from his sight, and the last thing he saw as they clustered around her was the heart monitor, bleeping loudly.

A little later, Jake Burton walked up the corridor with fresh flowers, and Rooney turned to him. ‘Something’s happened, I don’t know what, but they shut the curtains and there’s got to be eight of them round her. I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s her heart.’

Sonja had had one white wedding, and she had decided that this time she would get married in deep red, a rich colour more suitable for both a Swiss wedding in winter, she thought, and for a mature bride. The close-fitting crimson suit, with rich brown fur collar and cuffs, accentuated her tall, slim figure, while she had bought a frighteningly expensive hussar’s cap in the same fur, which she was now wondering whether or not to wear.

She put it on, took it off, fluffed out her hair, then crossed to the far side of the room across the expanse of pale green carpet: she and Arthur had booked the Grace Kelly Suite in the best hotel in Geneva, with private sitting and dining rooms and a marvellous view of the lake. She walked towards her reflection in the long cheval mirror, studying it intently.

‘Too much fur?’ she asked, as Arthur appeared. ‘I don’t know whether or not to wear the hat.’

He was wearing a smart suit, with a rose in the buttonhole, and a matching waistcoat, and was knotting his tie. ‘Put it on and let me see,’ he said.

Sonja did as he asked and turned to face him: she looked beautiful, he thought, but she was different now, and it wasn’t just the unfamiliar new costume. For all these years he had yearned to possess her without Harry Nathan, but now that Nathan’s shadow had gone, she was not the same woman, less driven, less intense, as though someone had dropped the end of a rope she had pulled against for years, sometimes seeming younger, sometimes older. Was she free now, he wondered, or adrift?