Cross and Burn (18 page)

T
he session with Jacob Gold had left Tony profoundly unsettled. He’d seen two patients at Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital that afternoon and he could barely remember any of the ground they’d covered. When his own mental state interfered with the quality of treatment he was delivering, it was clearly time to take seriously the uncomfortable conclusion he’d been irresistibly drawn towards.

After work he’d gone home to the narrowboat, determined for the first time to see it not as a poor fallback position but as a symbol of change and possibility. That he had adapted to living in a place and style he’d never previously contemplated was a positive thing, he told himself, summoning up an image of himself wagging a finger in his own face. And when he stopped to think about it, he had to admit how much he liked the compact nature of life on board. The only drawback was the lack of space for his books. But surely there had to be a way round that? Lateral thinking, that was what he needed. Maybe he could rent a nearby storage unit and use that as a book room, somehow? It wasn’t as if he’d mind the walk. He gave a hollow chuckle. ‘Chances are, I’d have worked out whatever it was I needed the book for by the time I got there,’ he said aloud.

‘It’s not books you need right now,’ he continued, opening the fridge and the storage cupboard next to it. ‘It’s food. What use is pasta sauce without pasta? Or milk without breakfast cereal? Or butter without bread?’ Time for an emergency shopping trip. He grabbed one of the sturdy reusable carrier bags that Carol –
ouch, no, let her go, you can’t get sentimental over a bloody carrier bag
– had made him buy when they’d ended up late-night grocery shopping in the middle of a case. There was a convenience store branch of a supermarket chain a couple of streets away; he’d be back inside half an hour.

But back to what? Unresolved thoughts chasing round his brain like a ball in a pinball arcade, empty chairs reminding him of his empty life, case notes for patients who frankly felt more stable than he did right now. He needed to fill the hours before sleep with something more constructive than brooding.

Tony put on his coat and set off into the evening, determined to walk Carol Jordan out of his system. What he needed was to occupy his mind with something else, something more challenging. He let his mind drift backwards, waiting for it to find a baited hook to snag on.

And there it was, as he rounded the corner of the tapas bar. Paula’s missing woman. He fished his phone out and called her. As soon as she answered, he dived straight in. ‘Paula, is your missing woman still missing?’

‘And hello to you too, Tony. Yes, as far as I know. I haven’t been directly involved today, but I would have heard if there had been any developments.’

‘So the last anyone knows is that she was going to stop at Freshco on the way home? She left work as usual and nobody saw her after that?’

‘I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. Here’s something else that might interest you. You know the murder I’m on? Nadia Wilkowa? We think he used a taser on her.’

‘That narrows things down, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not like spiking a drink in a crowded bar and waiting for it to kick in. It’s up close and personal. And he’s acquired her somewhere relatively private. You can’t taser someone in front of an audience. Not unless you’re a cop. Plus, you’ve got to have your getaway lined up, because a taser, that’s not like knocking somebody out. Your victim gets their body back in pretty short order, isn’t that right? So you’ve got to have a plan, it can’t be a spur-of-the-moment thing.’

‘Are you done?’ Paula’s tone was mild, amused.

‘Just thinking aloud, sorry.’

‘No, it’s fascinating, listening to your mind work. If I hear anything more about Bev, I’ll keep you posted. But I thought you weren’t that interested?’

He turned up his collar against the chill wind that hit him as he emerged from the shelter of the buildings around the basin. ‘I’m trying to take my mind for a walk.’

‘OK. Have you got it on a leash?’

‘Very funny. I don’t suppose you know which Freshco she used?’

‘Not for sure, but the logical route from the hospital to home would take her past the big Freshco on Kenton Vale Road. You know the one I mean?’

‘On the right as you’re coming from town? Before the roundabout?’

‘That’s the one. Why?’

‘I need some groceries.’ And, having nothing further to say, he ended the call. As he replaced his phone in his pocket, he wondered whether his tendency only to use the phone for what was absolutely necessary was a hangover from his youth, when landline phone calls were comparatively expensive. His grandmother, who had done most of the hands-on work of raising him, had regarded the phone as a means of parting fools and their money and only permitted its use in what she considered emergencies. He remembered she’d lived in terror of losing her low-user rebate. And then when mobile phones had first been introduced, they’d been prohibitively expensive to call and to make calls from, reinforcing his grandmother’s message of frugality. It couldn’t just be a generational thing, though; he knew plenty of his contemporaries who chatted away on the phone with casual disregard for what it might cost. No, it had to be one of his own personal quirks. A notion that was borne out by the reaction of most of his friends and colleagues to his own reticence during their phone conversations. Carol had always – No. He wasn’t going to allow his memories of Carol to take up space in his mind.

Kenton Vale Road was about two miles away. There wasn’t a direct route; he’d have to zigzag across the outskirts of the city centre, but the map he carried in his head was up to the task. He could manage this more or less on automatic pilot while he did some real thinking.

What exactly would it mean, to cut Carol Jordan out of his life for good? Take it step by step. In practical terms, compared to how things used to be between them, she was already out of his life. For the past few years, they’d lived in the same building. His house had occupied the top two floors, her basement flat a staircase and a locked door away from him. They hadn’t lived in each other’s pockets, but he’d always had a general awareness of her presence and absence. He was like the Lord in the Psalms, preserving her going out and coming in.

Then he’d inherited the house in Worcester. For the first time in his life, he had somewhere to live that felt like home. The moment he’d stepped inside the big Edwardian house by the park, he’d finally understood what people meant when they said they belonged. Edmund Arthur Blythe’s house could have been built around Tony, so perfectly did it match. And it was a homecoming that seemed to have room in it for Carol. Living together under the same roof; a tentative step closer that might lead further still.

Everything had always been tentative between them. Two wary people whose life choices had inflicted emotional scars and psychological damage. Neither of them the sort of person you’d choose to love. But they had grown to understand that what bound them together was a kind of love. Not the conventional sort that quickly morphed into sweaty bodies in tangled sheets. It was never going to end up there, not with Tony’s inability to perform.

Instead, they’d fashioned a different sort of relationship that accommodated their professional and personal lives. They trusted each other in a way that neither trusted anyone else. Although they had never lived together, there was a connection in the dailyness of their lives that had made her absence very hard to bear.

But absent was what she had become. In her grief, instead of turning to him, she’d lashed out with all the pent-up violence in her heart. She’d made no bones about blaming him and the night she’d walked away from him had been the hardest he’d ever known. He’d tried to convince himself she would be back, but he’d been right to fail. She’d walked away from all of them without a backward glance. It was as if she had died, but in some shameful way that prevented people coming together to celebrate what she’d meant to them. The mourning was real, though.

Yet he had managed that first step beyond the rawness of grief. He was living somewhere that had no associations with her. She’d been on the boat only once, when it had been moored in another city, and it wasn’t a visit that had left a trail of happy memories. He wasn’t beset by images of her everywhere he looked; this was his domain, and that made getting along without her a little easier.

The second step was accepting that it was over. Whatever name you wanted to give what had existed between them, it was done. There might have been a way back to their easy companionship and affection if she’d returned after a short break and been willing to draw a line under what had happened. Hard though that would have been, it would have at least privileged the living over the dead. Something he always advocated with his patients. Now he had to practise what he preached.

Tony trudged on, paying no attention to his surroundings except to look up at road junctions so he could check his directions. When he walked like this, it acted like the release of a brake on thoughts and emotions. He could brace himself and be stern, tell himself he had to stop hankering for what he’d lost and accept that it was gone. There was no point in wistful yearning. It wasn’t going to happen.

He wasn’t there yet, he knew. But wanting to get there was half the battle. Then he could take the final step and, as the sort of therapist he despised would say, move on. Accept that chapter of his life was closed and give it a new shape. Believe that there were people out there who could fill the spaces in his life and in his heart.

Yeah, right.

It was going to take a few more sessions with Jacob before he could convince himself that life after Carol Jordan was somehow going to be magically better than it had been before the slow build of their relationship. The truth was, she was the only woman he’d ever dropped his defences for. She knew his dark places. She’d even survived his mother. How likely was it that he’d find another like her?

‘Stop it.’ His voice was as loud as a parade-ground command. It startled two teenagers minding their own business in a bus shelter, but he was oblivious to them. Luckily, he’d reached the main road in time to break his chain of thought. The supermarket was only a couple of hundred yards away and he began to rehearse his shopping list. ‘Pasta, cereal, nice bread. Maybe some ham or salami. Tomatoes, that would be good.’

Rather than use the pedestrian entrance, he walked into the car park by the route Bev would have taken. In the early evening, the supermarket was busy, the car park a constant juggling of traffic. Nearest the store, cars jockeyed for position, looking for parking slots that meant they had only a short distance to walk. ‘If you were in a hurry,’ Tony mused as he walked, ‘you’d be quicker to park in an outlying space and walk that bit further. Maybe that’s what you did, Bev. You didn’t want to deal with the hassle, just a quick in and out then home to your boy.’ He stopped and looked around him. The car park was pretty well lit, but he wondered how good Freshco’s CCTV coverage was. Out on the edges, it seemed the cameras were few and far between.

Tony continued into the supermarket, wondering about Bev McAndrew and Nadia Wilkowa. Two apparently blameless women gone missing, one dead already. No obvious source of conflict in their lives. He hoped he wasn’t the only one considering whether to put two and two together.

By the time he got to the checkout, he had managed to fill his basket to the brim. Coffee, a couple of pizzas, apples, grapes, eggs, bacon and cans of beans had mysteriously joined his existing list. Dismayed, he realised he’d never fit all this in one bag. Worse, he’d have to lug it across town. There was no time for revision, not unless he wanted to be lynched by the people behind him in the queue, so he shelled out for another bag-for-life and walked back to the car park while he considered his options.

He didn’t want to walk home. He’d done his thinking, it was starting to rain and his knee hurt, reminding him he was supposed to make an appointment with the consultant to talk about surgery. The very thought of what Mrs Chakrabarti had in mind made Tony sweat. He was on the point of calling a taxi when a double-decker bus lumbered through the car park and pulled into a bay only yards away from him.

According to the destination board, it was bound for Preston Street bus station. A mere five-minute walk from his mooring. It was a no-brainer. He waited while a handful of shoppers boarded ahead of him. He knew he didn’t have the correct change; boarding the bus would involve sighs and moans from the driver, and not in a good way.

As he expected, the driver tutted and muttered all the way through the process of issuing a ticket and changing a twenty-pound note. Tony raised his eyes to the heavens, seeking patience.

What he found was something quite unexpected. Mounted above the driver’s seat was the familiar CCTV monitor. Tony had never studied it before; if he’d ever given it any thought, he would have assumed it would show only the interior of the bus. But the reality was very different. The screen was split into nine sections, showing upper and lower decks, the entrance and exit doors and the rear of the bus, to make it easier for reversing, he presumed. What he hadn’t expected was how much of the outside of the bus was under surveillance. A wide-angle lens revealed the whole width of the pavement, extending as far as the plate-glass windows of the store; another showed the roadway on the far side of the bus. Tony imagined that if it was blown up on a single monitor it would be possible to read number plates. Maybe even identify drivers.

‘How often does this service run?’ he asked the driver, who was dropping pound coins one by one into his waiting hand.

The driver gave a weary sigh. ‘Every twenty minutes from seven in the morning till ten at night.’

‘Is this the only bus service that runs into the supermarket?’

‘Do I look like Google? Go and sit down so I can get moving.’

‘Can I stand here and watch the monitor?’