The Watcher (33 page)

She was now completely on her own for the first time. In a big, empty, silent house.

Probably it had been a mistake to return.

She was drinking her fourth cup of coffee when her phone rang. It was John.

‘Hi. I wanted to ask how you are doing.’

‘Pretty good. I cleaned the house, washed oodles of laundry and am just treating myself to a nice coffee.’ She sounded so falsely cheerful that it pained her to hear herself. ‘And how are you?’

‘You cleaned the house? Which house? Are you home again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? Just to clean it?’

‘I’ve moved back. This afternoon.’

‘But why?’

‘I live here. At least until I find somewhere else. I can’t avoid my own home for ever.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘What happened?’ he asked quietly in the end.

She gave up playing hide-and-seek with him. Why shouldn’t he know? ‘I had a fight with Tara. On Thursday evening, after you left. And since then . . . I haven’t felt comfortable in her house.’

‘What did you fight about?’

‘We talked about you. Becky had made an ugly scene because you and I had met again. After she stormed out of the room and locked herself in the bathroom, for some reason that I myself no longer understand, I was stupid enough to . . . tell Tara that you’d been a policeman. And why you aren’t any more.’

‘Aha. And she took that badly?’

‘She was gobsmacked. Sexual harassment is, of course, a term that isn’t particularly well received by most women. I explained the circumstances, but she could not understand that I believed your side of the story without any reservations. She certainly can’t understand why I keep on meeting you.’

‘I see,’ said John.

‘It wasn’t that she kept harping on about it after that,’ Gillian continued. ‘It was more that we avoided the topic completely. But I didn’t feel comfortable around her after that. I was always nervous when you called. And so I waited till she’d left the house before I called you. All in all, it was a stressful and unpleasant situation. And the other thing is . . .’

‘Yes?’ asked John, when she hesitated.

‘The thing is, I need to start living again. I can’t just sit on Tara’s sofa forever and wait for my future to open up before me. After all, Tara works all day. I’m mostly on my own when I’m at her place.’

‘But you’re on your own in your house too. And I don’t think that’s good for you.’

‘In my current situation, I don’t think anything is good for me.’

‘Let me come and visit. Or come and visit me. Please.’

‘Not today, John. I have to find my own path.’

He could understand her, but . . . ‘Listen, Gillian. There’s something else too. Apart from your difficult mental situation. You know, there’s the theory that your husband’s murder was a mistake. That you were the real target.’

‘I know. That’s not news.’

‘Gillian, the murderer didn’t get what he wanted. And we don’t know he won’t try again.’

‘I’m not going to open the door to anyone. I’m not going to leave the garage door unlocked. The house is secure, John. We’ve got an alarm system. I can turn it on at night.’

‘I don’t like the fact that you’re on your own.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Call me if anything happens, OK?

She promised she would.

After they’d finished talking, she started to stare at the wall again. She asked herself why she was feeling such a strong reaction to the idea of being near John. When she’d been at Tara’s, in the days after the murder, she herself had made contact with him, wished him near and hoped to find consolation and support from him. Then something had changed. Inside her. For hours she had sat there and brooded over what had happened. Over how she had first fallen into a depression, then rushed into an affair, and why Tom was dead now. The terrible realisation she came to was that she saw everything in an exaggeratedly dramatic light, and that this had set in motion a bad chain of events. She had been hurt by Tom’s withdrawal from her, but if she had looked closely she would have seen that he had never left her. She had let Becky’s aggression and stubbornness drive her crazy, when she could just have waited for her to grow up a bit. Nothing had happened in her life that did not happen in thousands of other women’s lives. And if she was not still –
still
– that girl with low self-esteem, she would have been able to see everything differently. All those years ago, she had gone from the security of her parents’ house much too quickly to marriage to Thomas Ward. From the first time they met, he had always been there for her. She had always felt safe with him. Much of what she had elatedly seen as her emancipation from her parents had really been an emancipation supported by a strong and self-confident man. When work started to demand more and more of Tom’s time and he barely had a minute in his busy schedule to breathe, she reacted like a neglected child and threw herself into the arms of the first man who came along. John appeared, desired her, admired her, gave her a feeling of warmth and self-confidence. But life could not go on like that. She had understood that in spite of all the pain, mourning and sense of guilt over the past few days. She had to learn to assert herself, however hard and bitter that path might prove.

Her mobile rang again. This time it was her mother, of all people, reporting that, given the circumstances, Becky was doing all right, that Becky and her grandfather had just gone swimming and that she would go to her therapist for the first session the next morning, on Monday. Then she wanted to know when Tom’s funeral was.

All that’s coming too, thought Gillian, exhausted.

‘I don’t know yet, Mummy. They’re still doing the autopsy. I’ll let you know in good time.’

‘What a horrific tragedy,’ her mother said. ‘I’m just happy you can stay with your friend! I wouldn’t have had a moment’s peace otherwise.’

Gillian decided to let her continue to believe she was at Tara’s. She knew she would never hear the end of it if she told her the truth, and she did not feel she had the strength to face that now.

‘Say hi to Becky from me,’ she said before they rang off. ‘Ask her to call me, all right? I’d like to hear her voice.’

Just after half past three. The long, silent afternoon lay ahead of her.

She stood up, putting on her boots, coat, scarf and gloves. Luckily it had snowed heavily in the past week. She would clear the drive of snow. Perhaps after that she would be too tired to have a breakdown.

‘Can you remember anything else about Liza Stanford?’ asked Christy. She could see that she had chosen a terrible time for her third visit to the surgery where Anne Westley had worked. It was the first Monday morning after the Christmas holidays for many schools. The waiting room was jam-packed. Christy had heard that two of the doctors had the flu. The two remaining GPs, a nervous young man and a woman, looked like they would be the next to be laid low. They were working flat out to deal with the horde of patients. Now Christy had appeared right in the middle of the chaos to once again ask urgent, detailed questions about their patient Finley Stanford and his mother. They would have liked to show her the door with a few polite phrases, but in the end they recognised that she was just doing her job.

‘Could you come back later?’ the receptionist had asked somewhat testily, but Christy had shaken her head in a friendly but decided manner.

‘Unfortunately not. Believe me, I’d not bother you if I had any other option.’

The woman, whose name badge revealed her to be
Tess Pritchard
, said she could answer a few questions. She led Christy into one of the sick doctors’ empty consulting rooms and sat down behind the desk, offering Christy one of the chairs in front of it. Asked again about Liza Stanford, she nodded.

‘Oh yes. I remember her well!’

‘Why? What did you notice about her?’

Tess snorted contemptuously. ‘Her wealth. And her arrogance. That woman had no lack of either.’

‘You mean, it was easy to see she was rich?’

‘You’d have had to be blind not to see it. Always wearing chic clothes. Expensive jewellery. Enormous Gucci sunglasses. A Hermès handbag. And her Bentley outside. She parked right outside the surgery once, so we saw it.’

‘I see. And she was . . . arrogant?’

‘Us assistants were beneath her,’ said Tess. ‘She barely managed to open her mouth to us. Her dignity didn’t allow her to. I expect she talked more to Dr Westley. She would have had to, if she wanted to explain what was wrong with her son.’

‘But you were never there at the consultations?’

Tess shook her head. ‘No. Not me or anyone else. It wouldn’t be normal. Unless someone is needed to assist the doctor. That wasn’t the case. There was never anything seriously wrong with the boy.’

‘What was your impression of Finley?’

Tess thought for a moment. ‘A nice boy. I thought he was friendly. Quiet, but not in a snobbish way like his mother. Just shy. A reserved child.’

‘Unusually shy? Unusually reserved?’

‘No. We see them all here, as you can imagine. Some children race round the waiting room like spinning tops and their parents can barely get them to sit down. Others, the ones who don’t like going to the doctor and who feel unsure of the whole situation, tend to clam up and withdraw into their shell. Finley was in that group, the ones who are reserved, but still absolutely normal.’

‘He started coming to the surgery quite late on, didn’t he? And if I understood correctly the files I was able to see on Friday, he only came five times. But he was never seen here when he was little, was he?’

‘No. He was seven when he came for the first time. As far as I can remember, he had developed bronchitis after a cold and it just wasn’t going away. So nothing major.’

‘He was pretty healthy, on the whole?’

‘Yes. The things his mother brought him here for were harmless enough illnesses. Often he wasn’t ill at all.’

‘Did Dr Westley ever say anything about Liza Stanford? An anecdote? Let something slip? Anything?’

‘No,’ said Tess. ‘She was very strict about confidentiality. At least to us, working in the surgery. She never mentioned anything about patients or their parents. Certainly not about Stanford. She will have noticed how we bitched about her and she would have been sure not to get involved. Not to fan the flames, as it were.’

‘Could she have talked about her to the other doctors?’

‘Maybe,’ said Tess, hesitantly. ‘But the two doctors here today weren’t working at this surgery when Dr Westley was still here. She talked a lot with Dr Phyllis Skinner.’

‘One of the doctors with the flu,’ Christy supposed.

‘Right. If she discussed a patient’s case with anyone here, then it would have been her.’

‘Can I have Dr Skinner’s address? I must speak to her urgently.’

‘Of course,’ said Tess, ready to help. She looked at her watch. She could hear her phone ringing incessantly. ‘Sergeant, I don’t want to be rude, but . . .’

‘I’m almost done,’ promised Christy. ‘Just two more things. To check that I’ve got the facts right. Finley was here from age seven to nine. He came five times. Now he’s twelve. That means he hasn’t been here for the last three years?’

‘The last three and a half years, in fact. That’s right.’

‘So he and his mother stopped coming after Dr Westley retired?’

‘Yes.’

‘And secondly, we have a statement saying that Liza Stanford suffered from depression. Depression that meant she sometimes disappeared completely for periods of time. She would leave her family and be untraceable. Did you know about that?’

‘No,’ said Tess, astonished.

‘You never noticed any depression?’

‘Well,’ said Tess. ‘Frankly, I’d eat my hat if she was depressed. The way she was certainly put other people into depressions. That’s all. She herself . . . well, you can’t see inside people, of course, especially if they refuse to talk properly to you, but I just can’t imagine it in her case. From my dealings with Liza Stanford, I’d completely exclude that possibility.’

‘Thank you for your time,’ said Christy.

There were three women left on Christy’s list of people to visit: the three other members of Ellen Curran’s women’s group apart from the murdered Carla Roberts and the disappeared Liza Stanford.

Ellen had emailed over all the group members’ names and addresses, but Christy had soon found out that she would only be able to talk to one of the women. The other two had gone off together in December for a tour of New Zealand. They would only be back in England in February, and attempts to reach them had, as yet, gone unrewarded.

Which left Nancy Cox, who sounded nice on the phone. ‘Just come over this morning,’ she had said to Christy. ‘I’ve been enjoying my retirement for a year now. I’ve got time.’

The rush-hour traffic was starting to thin out as Christy drove across town. She remembered her conversation with Fielder on Saturday. She had wanted to know what kind of person Logan Stanford was, as she only knew him from the media. Fielder had hesitated a good while before replying.

‘To be honest, I don’t like him,’ he had said in the end. ‘But of course that can’t influence the investigation in the slightest. He is just so damn rich and he really lets it show. I’ve never liked people like that. What’s more, he’s a classic hotshot lawyer. You feel he’d sell his own grandmother. That he doesn’t mind stretching the truth or evading taxes or slapping injunctions on anyone who crosses him. You know what I mean?’

She had laughed. ‘Yes, I do. But careful what you say. Especially about tax evasion!’

‘I’m just telling you what I think, Christy. No idea if it’s true. But with him you can imagine it.’

‘And his wife’s disappearance really doesn’t disturb him?’

‘He’s used to it, he says. He’s just as used to her suddenly appearing again. That’s why he’s not too worried.’

‘Does that sound normal to you? I mean, even if you’re used to it . . . Someone who is so depressed that she disappears for weeks . . . That’s not right! He can’t just ignore it. Surely he’d try to help her.’