Friends to Die For (30 page)

Greg had asked her whether she’d thought at the time that it was Alfonso who’d punched her in the face.

She hadn’t answered the question. The truth was, she didn’t have a clue.

Her head was buzzing. She should leave this to Vogel and his team. Michelle knew she was too involved. She was a victim. If you were a victim, you could not detach yourself. You couldn’t
sift through the facts with anything like the required objectivity. The way Vogel always did. She trusted Vogel, didn’t she? No one was more meticulous than him, no one less likely to leap to
conclusions. She had to trust Vogel.

Although she was so very wide awake Michelle still felt exhausted. She told herself she should try to get back to sleep. That if she could only sleep until dawn, things might straighten
themselves out. Her doubts might resolve themselves without her doing anything about them.

She turned over on her side and shut her eyes. But sleep was not to come. Instead of the oblivion she craved, she lay in her bed tossing and turning, thoughts racing through her mind. After what
seemed like a very long time, though it was actually only twenty minutes or so, she gave up. Sleep was not going to come, and there was nothing she could do about it, except perhaps repeat the
previous day’s overgenerous doses of whisky and prescription drugs. But now that this idea had taken over her brain, she doubted that such measures would have any effect.

She climbed out of bed, wrapped a dressing gown around her shoulders, made herself tea in the little kitchen and took it to the window at the far end of her room, the one that overlooked
Theobalds Road. She glanced at her watch. It was just gone three now. Still the middle of the night. But there was an intermittent flow of traffic on the street below her. Central London never
sleeps. A couple of black cabs, one with its light on, rolled by. A motorist in a four-wheel drive sounded his horn at a cyclist who stuck two fingers up at the retreating vehicle and hollered some
incomprehensible abuse.

Michelle’s nose was beginning to throb again. She wondered how long it would be before that throbbing began to ease. The numbing effects of the painkillers had totally worn off, and the
pain was back with a vengeance. Aside from being distressing in its own right, the throbbing was a constant reminder of the sorry state of her face and the horrible reality of her injuries having
been caused by someone she cared about.

She made her way into her tiny bathroom, removed the bottle of painkillers from the mirrored cabinet on the wall, and swallowed two of them, the correct dose this time, filling her tooth mug
with tap water to wash them down.

She hoped they would do the job well enough, because she was determined not to deaden her brain for the second day in a row. She needed all her wits about her if she was going to make sense of
the thoughts buzzing around inside her head.

It could be nothing. The brief snippet of conversation probably didn’t mean anything, she told herself. If it had, surely it would have triggered an immediate reaction from her the moment
the words were uttered? But then, sitting there in the restaurant surrounded by the unscathed faces of her friends, she’d been oblivious to anything beyond her own misery. Moreover
she’d been far too befuddled by drink and painkillers to react immediately to what she’d heard. Maybe she wasn’t too bad a cop after all, even if she was stuck in Traffic, because
something had filtered through, something had lodged in her subconscious. And now it had shifted from the back of her mind to lodge firmly at the forefront.

She wandered back to her chair by the window, switching on the radio on the way. As usual it was tuned to BBC Radio 2. Michelle liked Radio 2. She knew it was a bit naff to admit to enjoying
something so middle of the road, but she didn’t care. There was something wonderfully unchallenging and restful about Radio 2.

The kind of music somebody at the BBC had chosen as suitable for the early hours wafted over her as she gazed out of the window. She recognized the distinctive notes of Acker Bilk’s
trombone playing ‘Stranger on the Shore’. It had been a favourite of her father’s. Michelle’s eyes filled with tears. She so wished her police officer father, the
inspiration behind Michelle’s choice of career, were still alive. He would know what to do. He had always known what to do.

Outside, a group of migrating clubbers, three young men and two girls, made their way noisily along the pavement, laughing and talking loudly. Bizarrely, Michelle was reminded of the good old
days of Sunday Club. At first glance the little troop sashaying its way along Theobalds Road, so much younger, so much dafter, and no doubt popping E and God knows what else to keep themselves
awake, could not have been more different from her old group of friends. But it was the way these kids were with each other, their obvious closeness, their ease in each other’s company,
verbally and physically, as they joshed and teased, linked arms and patted backs and shoulders. Surely that was the way she and the other Sunday Clubbers had once been, before everything went
wrong.

She ran through them all in her mind: Marlena dead; Alfonso in jail; Ari, seemingly desperate to restore what could never be restored; Greg, no longer able to maintain his upmarket-barrow-boy
act; Karen, frightened for Greg, as she probably always had been, missing the way he’d been in the past, anxious about their future, and that of their children; Bob, always inclined to be
depressive, now sinking irrevocably into his own malcontent; Tiny and Billy, mourning their lost dog and a lost way of life, but still with each other to cling to; George, unfathomable as ever, but
with despair in those dark handsome eyes.

And her? Where did she stand in all of this? Michelle made another mug of tea, pouring boiling water and cold milk over a solitary tea bag, muttering disconsolately to herself as she did so. So
far as the group were concerned, Michelle Monahan had been striving to rebuild her life in the wake of her divorce, and young enough and pretty enough and ambitious enough to make a success of it.
Wasn’t that the way they’d seen her? The truth was, she’d been far more broken by sorrow than anyone realized. Except, ironically, the husband who had betrayed and then deserted
her.

All Michelle had ever wanted was to be a mother. But her attempts to conceive a child had ended in false alarms, an ectopic pregnancy and three miscarriages. And then came the diagnosis of
early-stage cervical cancer. She’d been forced to have a hysterectomy in order to survive. Her bosses and colleagues in the force had no idea; she’d told them that she was in hospital
for something entirely different, and begged her husband never to reveal the truth. It seemed to Michelle that the loss of her womb had robbed her not only of the chance of becoming a mother but
also of her womanhood. And she couldn’t bear to be an object of pity. Her husband had promised it would be their secret, their sad secret. As far as she knew, he had at least kept that
promise, the only one of all that he had made. After he left her, she’d questioned whether he’d ever been faithful to her. Whatever the case, she doubted he would have walked out if she
had been able to give him a child. Now she’d learned that he was expecting a baby with the new woman in his life. While she, all alone, battered and beaten in more ways than one, would never
have a child of her own. With her shattered face and shattered dreams, it was doubtful she would ever again have a man of her own either. Not one she wanted, anyway.

She shivered. It was the beginning of the second week in April, but the days were cool and wet and the nights still very cold. The heating in her flat continued to play up. Sitting for so long
by the window, with only a light dressing gown over her Marks and Spencer’s pyjamas, she was thoroughly chilled, although she’d only just noticed her discomfort because she was so
preoccupied. With Marlena, and the rest of them, and with her own fractured state, both physically and mentally.

She switched on the small electric fire she’d bought the last time the heating had broken down, carried her mug of tea over to the sleeping area and put it down on the bedside table while
she pulled on jeans, thick socks, a T-shirt, a shirt over it, and a warm sweater.

Even before her face had been wrecked, Michelle had come to the conclusion that the only thing she had left in life was the job. In Dorset she’d been a detective constable, but after the
divorce there was no way she could face working alongside the husband who’d abandoned her. She’d never have taken the job in Traffic, but it was all that was on offer at the time. Plus
it was the Met, and she’d been promised it wouldn’t be long before an opportunity would present itself for her to return to CID. That was two years ago, and here she was, still stuck in
the department she loathed. Even a switch to mainstream uniform would do. Anything but Traffic.

And then Vogel had started delving into her affairs, doubting her explanation as to why she had pulled a sickie. Checking her out as if he wasn’t sure what she might have done or might be
capable of. She knew then that not only would her hope of a transfer be destroyed but with it any hope she had of rebuilding her life.

And so she’d lied to him. Lying to the Sunday Club crowd had been one thing. She hadn’t thought that it would matter. She hadn’t known that there was someone out there
determined to hurt them. She hadn’t considered for one moment that she too might become a victim. At that stage it had still been possible that Marlena’s accident was just that, that
the earlier incidents had been childish pranks. With each new incident, even the abduction and killing of the two dogs, she’d tried to tell herself that this was just a chain of random,
unconnected events, the sort of thing that could only happen in a place the size of London.

Michelle had lied to Vogel and to Sunday Club for reasons, deeply personal reasons, that had nothing to do with the frightening chain of events unfolding around her. She’d lied because of
the lengths to which her longing for a child had driven her.

She and Phil had been about to adopt a child when he dropped the bombshell that he was leaving her. The adoption authorities had immediately withdrawn their support. Michelle had pleaded with
them, pointing out that single-parent adoptions were no longer uncommon. Their response had been that her new status as a single parent wasn’t the problem. It was the turmoil surrounding her
marriage break-up that was the issue.

In desperation she’d turned to the Internet, researching every possible avenue to getting a child. That was how she’d learned about a ground-breaking operation, still largely
experimental, that might make it possible for her to give birth: a womb transplant. Her own doctor had advised that, in her case, such an operation would not only be exceedingly unlikely to
succeed, or certainly not to the extent that would allow her to safely carry a child to full term, but, with particular regard to the effect of the hysterectomy that had been forced upon her, would
also be highly dangerous. He’d refused to forward her for any such treatment under the National Health Service. Refusing to admit defeat, she had sought out a Harley Street consultant who was
an expert in the field. Though she had no idea how she would finance such a major medical procedure, she’d been determined to find a way. However, the Harley Street man had delivered the same
prognosis, advising her that no reputable doctor would be prepared to undertake such an operation on a woman with her medical history.

So Michelle had gone back to the Internet and found a dodgy Indian surgeon who was as famous for his lack of scruples as for his undoubted brilliance. He’d originally trained in London but
had been struck off the UK medical register following a high-profile case that had resulted in the death of a patient. Since then, the surgeon’s maverick approach had led to him being banned
from practising not only in Britain but throughout most of Europe, and many other parts of the world. Apparently he was motivated not so much by financial gain as a sincere belief that the type of
operation he was performing, while still in its infancy at the moment and therefore subject to a degree of trial and error, would ultimately revolutionize obstetric surgery. In his eyes, that
justified the use of human guinea pigs. Even the manner in which he acquired the wombs that he used in his transplant operations had come, rather chillingly, under scrutiny. Michelle knew all this,
and yet she was prepared to take the risk. He was, after all, her only hope.

Aside from the obvious danger she would be exposing herself to if she allowed him to operate on her, a risk which she considered to be her business and no one else’s, there was the
question of legality. As a serving police officer, she was jeopardizing her career as well as her life. She hadn’t cared though. The moment she’d learned that the surgeon had travelled
incognito to Switzerland where he was preparing to examine potential patients, she had dropped everything and jumped on a plane to Zurich. So far as her bosses were concerned, she was absent
through illness. So far as her friends were concerned, she was on a training course.

Ironically, it had all been for nothing. Even that notorious renegade of the medical profession had refused to operate on Michelle. Then, after her meeting with him, she had returned to her
Zurich hotel room, switched on her phone, and found a series of voicemails from her friends about the attack on Marlena. From that point on the horrors just kept on coming: the abduction and
killing of the two little dogs, Vogel’s suspicions about her, the attack that had left her face in ruins, and finally Marlena’s murder.

Now there could be no doubt that the Sunday Clubbers were being viciously targeted. Most likely by one of their own.

Until last night, Michelle had been convinced that Alfonso was the culprit. Guilty as charged. Vogel was a meticulous man, Michelle reminded herself for the umpteenth time. He did not make
mistakes. And he certainly didn’t make mistakes in a murder inquiry.

Oblivious to Vogel’s doubts about the case, she found she was beginning to harbour doubts of her own. In an effort to shrug them off, she took another sip of her tea, then lay down, fully
clothed, on her unmade bed. In spite of her anxiety she drifted off to sleep. It was a fretful, restless sleep, but when she woke she was surprised to see bright wintery sunshine streaming through
the east-facing window above her kitchen sink. Her digital alarm clock told her that it was now 8.05 a.m.