The Watchful Eye (11 page)

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ she said. ‘I watched my husband fade away as they injected him with God knows what.’

‘Medicine’s advanced since then.’

‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘The only thing I want from you, Daniel, at the moment, is adequate pain relief and something to help me sleep.’

He nodded, typed out a prescription for morphine and a sleeping tablet and handed it to her. She didn’t even glance at it but smiled. ‘Thank you, Daniel,’ she said.

He mused for a while after she had gone. She’d only started calling him by his Christian name recently. Previously she had maintained formal address. She had been widowed more than twenty years ago, way before he had joined the practice. Her husband had been a lecturer in Wolverhampton, she a teacher in the secondary school in Stone, Alleyne’s. She lived in one of the ancient cottages up Kerry Lane. He loved the place. Quaint and full of character and original features, arched Gothic windows and with its own apple tree orchard, which did beg to have a pony grazing in it. It would probably be up for sale before long, he mused. Had he, Holly and Elaine still been the happy family he had anticipated, he would have considered buying it and letting Holly have the pony she had so wanted.

But then the centre of Birmingham was not a suitable place to have a pony and Holly had stopped even mentioning horses soon after her mother had left. She appeared to have
transferred her interest from the real thing to some poisonous pink plastic creature called My Little Pony.

Another dream shattered by the broken marriage.

He walked into the reception area, still a little depressed and reflective, both about Maud Allen and the fallout from his divorce. Marie Westbrook was busy, reading her mail.

‘You look down,’ she commented. ‘Fancy a coffee?’

‘That’d be nice.’

She bustled over to the kettle and mugs then handed him his drink.

‘So what’s got into you?’

He told her about Maud Allen and she gave him an odd look. ‘But she’s eighty-six,’ she said. ‘Surely you don’t still get sentimental about timely death?’

He felt wrong-footed. ‘Never quite got used to it.’

She flashed him a wide, friendly smile. ‘Well, there you go,’ she said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

A moment later she clapped her palm to her forehead. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Bobby Millin asked if you’d ring. She’s at Vanda’s place.’

‘I wish you had forgotten,’ he said. ‘I bet it’s about Anna-Louise.’

She handed him a slip of paper with the number on and gave him a look of sympathy.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Get it over with, eh?’

He dialled the number and listened to Roberta’s gravelly voice cataloguing all the reasons why her granddaughter should see the paediatrician without delay. He let her speak without pausing as the minutes ticked away.

‘I’ve taken some blood,’ he said. ‘I should have the results
by Tuesday. Remember she has been an inpatient and they didn’t find anything.’

‘She’s not right, that child,’ Bobby Millin said forcefully. ‘I don’t need a medical degree to tell me that even if you do.’

‘Has anything happened
since
I saw her this morning that would make me change my mind?’

‘No-o.’

‘Look, Bobby,’ Daniel said reasonably, ‘I’ll see Anna-Louise any time. You know that, but sometimes…’

She butted in. ‘Don’t start calling me an anxious granny,’ she snapped. ‘Something is wrong with that child. I can sense it. I’ve always had an instinct for this sort of thing and something is very wrong with my granddaughter and I shall hold you responsible if anything happens to her. I’m fed up with watching her sicken and you doing nothing about it.’

Daniel felt tired – defeated. Threats like this were every doctor’s nightmare. ‘Bring her in to my Tuesday evening surgery,’ he said wearily. ‘I should have the results back by then and it’ll give the antibiotics a chance to work.’

Bobby Millin gave a loud snort and put the phone down, leaving Daniel feeling terrible. Some minutes later he was aware that Marie was still hanging around, a pleasant, empathic smile on her face, which for some reason made him feel awkward. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was hoping he’d suggest they call in at the pub again but he didn’t want to.

So he said nothing and the silence grew as she bustled around in the reception area. Eventually she left. He could hear a tinge of disappointment as she wished him goodbye. Thank goodness for the long weekend.

He was stroking the lace, which felt surprisingly sharp against his fingers, unlike the satin which was as smooth as her skin. He fiddled with the pearl earrings, imagining them threading through her ear lobes.

He would make a collection. This was just the start.

Brian was watching his wife, sitting at the dressing table, blow-drying her hair. She was wearing a satin dressing gown in a pale blue shade. It was open at the neck. He could see the hollow of her throat, follow it down to the sternum, towards the swell of her breasts. She had small breasts, uptilted and pointed. He had thought that after Bethan they might start to sag but they had not changed, even though she had breast-fed Bethan until she was four months old. Claudine was watching him from the corner of her eye, well aware that he was watching her. She always knew when he was watching her.

She tilted her head back, slowly drying the strands of hair, arching her back. The action reminded him of the day he had first seen her wearing only the bottom half of a pink bikini. No more than a pair of knickers, really, he’d thought in his prudish, British copper’s mind. She had been a graceful, flirty young thing. He could still visualise her sitting on the beach, breasts pertly exposed, pretending to chat and laugh with her friends, throwing her head back, showing a mouthful of white and perfect teeth. But he had been well aware that her attention
was not on her chit-chat or on the smoothing of the suntan cream up and down her arms but diverted surreptitiously towards him.

She had sensed that he was watching her from the shade of the beach bar. Full of holiday audacity and Dutch courage bestowed on him by the hot sun and the cold beer he had kept his eyes firmly on her, willing her to turn round and look directly at him. But she hadn’t – at least, not then. Not until she had started to pack her things into the pink and yellow beach bag, slipped into a scrap of a dress and sauntered past.
Then
she had met his gaze boldly, with a message so unmistakable in her own dark eyes that his three friends had immediately started to tease him. He knew they were simply jealous.

She had been a coquette then; she still was.

Brian felt a sudden rush of hot jealousy.
She was taking great care with her toilette today.
The little worm bored information into his mind.

Daniel Gregory was a wealthy, professional, divorced man and Claudine was very attractive.

Like most men he couldn’t really gauge whether Gregory would be attractive to women, but he guessed so – if only from the way his wife fluttered her eyelashes at him.

And he was letting, no
encouraging
his wife to spend half the day and the entire evening with him.

Was he mad?

When he had first taken Claudine home his mother had warned him about her flirtatiousness, at the same time pointing out that he had a jealous and possessive nature. Hadn’t he followed an ex around after she had ended the affair? Hadn’t he threatened the boy she had taken up with?

‘That French girl,’ she had said with bitter venom, ‘will laugh at you behind your back one day. Watch her. You’ll see.’

So had begun an enmity between mother and daughter-in-law which had never mellowed into anything better.

But then, he argued, in defence of his wife, his mother was a sour and cynical woman ever since her husband had found himself a newer, younger replacement. Brian never saw him now but he knew his father was happy and had a new family, twin sons who must, by now, be teenagers.

Good luck to him, he thought – when he thought about him at all.

But he was well aware that his mother’s dark predictions, lurking in his subconscious, were not helping matters.

Claudine finished drying her hair, replaced the hair dryer in the top drawer and was rooting around in her underwear drawer. She stood up, frowning. ‘Brian,’ she said slowly, ‘have you seen my new cream lingerie, the lacy ones, that I bought last week?’

He was tired. He simply wanted to go to bed and sleep. Last night had been long and tiring. He felt a sudden irritation. For goodness’ sake. She had a drawer full of the stuff.

He gave a loud, stagy yawn and lay back, closing his eyes. But she wasn’t going to let it go. She rifled noisily through the drawer for a few more minutes then stood over him.

‘You know,’ she insisted, ‘the cream bra and pants. They’re gone.’

He felt another sting of jealousy. Why should she care about wearing her best underwear when she was simply going to the pictures with slimy Gregory?

He didn’t like the answer his imagination was supplying.

But just to please her he opened his eyes, sat up and gave a cursory glance at the pile of filmy underwear. There seemed so much there. Piles of it. He couldn’t even be bothered to look. So he lay back again. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Perfectly sure.’ She turned to give him a half-smile. It was an intimate gesture, designed to be so. ‘You know I am careful about such things.’

He grunted.

‘Something else is missing,’ she went on, ‘my pearl earrings.’ There was a note of hysteria in her voice. ‘They are not here either.’

Brian Anderton grunted. Now what did she think he would do with a pair of earrings?

Claudine was still rummaging around in her dressing table drawer, frowning. Then she stood back, hands on her hips. ‘Something is different here. Things are not quite as I left them.’

She opened the other two drawers, still frowning.

‘Someone has been going through my things.’

‘Probably Bethan.’

Claudine opened the bedroom door and called through. ‘Bethan. Bethan. Come here.’

Bethan appeared in the doorway, holding her doll.

‘Have you been in my drawers, looking through my things?’

‘No.’

‘Have you seen my pearl earrings, the little ones that belonged to Grandmama?’

‘No, Mummy.’

Brian looked from his wife to his daughter. Bethan did not
lie. They had made a great virtue out of telling the truth and as far as he was aware she always had.

But then neither was Claudine in the habit of being mistaken – not about her personal possessions. She was a very particular woman, careful and fussy and those pearl earrings were her only heirlooms from her grandmother who had been a Parisian beauty at the time of the German occupation. She had been propositioned by an SS officer and when she had refused to cooperate had been briefly imprisoned for a trumped up accusation of working for the Resistance. In Claudine’s eyes she was a heroine – as was anyone in modern day France who had stood up to the Germans – and this made those pearl earrings precious beyond mere money.

Jeanne Voisier had died an old woman, a few years before Brian had met the coquettish, yet demure, French girl on a beach in the south of France. He had been a shy and inexperienced youth of nineteen, a junior police cadet who had found Claudine’s foreignness and sexual openness intensely exciting, unbelievably exotic. She, on the other hand, had teased him about his English starchiness, his sexual inhibitions and his inability to look at her sunbathing topless without blushing.

‘Oh, Brian,’ she would say. ‘You are truly an English suet pudding.’

To him the miracle had been that she could possibly love him. He adored her.

And this made him vulnerable.

Claudine grumbled and fumbled, finally finished her preparations, planted a kiss on his cheek and left. But having wanted to rest so much he found he could not sleep. He mulled over the two innocuous incidents, stringing them
together to make something as frightening as a noose out of a simple piece of rope.

One: personal items of his wife’s had been audaciously stolen from their own back garden.

Two: further objects were missing from the house. Claudine was meticulous and careful about her own possessions so he knew that when she claimed a set of underwear and a pair of pearl earrings were missing it was true.

But how was it possible?

After tossing and turning for an hour or so he rose and opened the front door, picked up the geranium pot and found the front door key. But his policeman’s eyes picked up other minor details. He always placed the key right in the centre. But here it was, carelessly dropped at one side. He knew it had been moved. It could have been Claudine or Bethan. That was what it was there for. But he did not think so. Bethan was always with her mother and Claudine was careful. He had never known her to lock herself out. In fact, even had she done so, she would almost certainly have forgotten the key was there at all.

So he picked up the key very slowly, seeing in his mind’s eye, not his wife’s nor his daughter’s hand, but another hand pick it up. Maybe even take it to a shop and have a copy cut.

When does one start to panic?

Never, says the stoic policeman.

Always, replies the husband and father, because a family brings with it a responsibility to protect and in Brian Anderton the instinct to protect was particularly strong. Perhaps it was the fact that his father had simply dropped out of his life when he had been only fourteen and his mother had turned the full force of her vengeance and dependency on him. Maybe that
was the reason that his wife and daughter evoked a fierce sense of duty in him. He turned the key with its plastic fob over and over in his hand very, very slowly and again he asked himself the same question.

Was it possible someone was invading their house as well as stealing clothes from the washing line, or was he allowing his suspicious policeman’s mind to invent a situation? Maybe the explanation was both logical and simple, that Claudine had used the key herself and replaced it.

He must ask her before he started jumping to conclusions, or started changing the locks, but he disliked unexplained puzzles. He made his decision then. It wouldn’t hurt to fit a few more bolts inside the doors and persuade Claudine to consider safety, if not for herself then for their daughter. And he didn’t replace the key underneath the geranium pot. He had always felt uneasy about it being there but Claudine had persuaded him that Eccleston was safe and with his experience of the town he had given in.

But now…

He could always fit a CCTV camera to watch the house while they were out.

The Watchfull Eye.

Daniel, Claudine and the girls had arranged to meet at The Yellow House so they could travel in one car to Stafford and the multiplex cinema. Daniel had offered to drive.

The two girls were initially shy until Holly dragged Bethan upstairs to look at her latest Barbie doll outfit. It was a particularly gaudy affair with spangles shaped into a fish tail and a two-shell top and it transformed Barbie into a mermaid. What exactly happened to Blaine on these occasions, Daniel
was not quite sure. He’d certainly never seen the blond boogie-boarder dressed as a merman.

What did it matter anyway? They were just dolls.

While the girls were upstairs, playing, he and Claudine sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee from china mugs. In her direct way she came straight to the point.

‘Are you happy on your own?’

He studied her face before answering. He had initially thought that she wore no make-up. But now he could see she did, mascara, foundation, eye shadow and lipstick. But it was so subtly applied it enhanced her natural look, the smooth skin, the large eyes. His glance dropped to her hands cradling the coffee mug. They bore the same stamp: short, shaped nails with clear polish. He felt a powerful attraction stirring.

Why did she have to be married?

‘No, I don’t really like it,’ he said. ‘To be honest…’ He stopped. Claudine and Internet dating sites seemed a million miles apart. He settled on a half-truth. ‘I’d love to meet someone.’

She reached out then and covered his hand with her own. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you should. Holly would like it.’ Her eyes seemed to be stuck on his.

He stood up then. ‘Do you want another coffee or something?’

‘Oh no, thank you.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Perhaps we should go. We can have a drink there.’

It took less than fifteen minutes to reach Stafford, wending along a country road and under the M6, which was suffering from the usual roadworks and resulting traffic chaos. Daniel parked outside the cinema and they headed for the Harvester
pub next door. The girls favoured Coke but he and Claudine elected for a glass of wine with their lunch. Claudine turned her nose up at the food but settled for a Caesar salad, while he and the girls gave in to temptation and tucked into steak and chips. He thought he had rarely tasted food so good and knew it was nothing to do with the cooking. It was the company which improved it.

The girls chattered throughout the meal while he and Claudine looked on indulgently. He glanced around him at other families on their outing and hoped that they assumed Claudine was his wife. He smiled at her and wondered if she had had the same idea and, if she had, whether she would like it.

The film was a typical Disney, plenty of big-eyed heroines, cartoon characters, a nasty-looking demon and a handsome prince. The girls sat between them but all the time he was aware of Claudine. Each time he looked across at her she seemed to pick up on it and turned her head to smile at him. Even though she was two seats away he caught wafts of her perfume every time she moved.

Guy was watching the house.

Damn it. Plod was at home all day. The bedroom curtains remained drawn. He had watched her leave with the little girl hours ago and still the curtains remained stubbornly closed. He sighed. PC Anderton must be on nights. What a shame. It would have been an ideal opportunity.

‘Denied,’ he muttered. ‘Access denied.’

He would have to satisfy himself with touching the things he had already salted away so he walked, grumpily, back to his flat, and spread all the underwear on the bed, as though he
was packing for a holiday, the entire bed spread with the filmy garments, in all colours: peach and pink, pale blue, cream, white and black. He finished by placing the pearl earrings side by side on his pillow. But it didn’t bring him the usual pleasure. He sat up, disturbed. His jujus were losing their power. The scent of her perfume was receding, her presence fading away. He had a feeling of panic. What if he couldn’t get any more?

It was no good. He put his feet on the floor. He felt restless and fidgety.