To Catch a Rabbit (19 page)

She stepped off the train at Doncaster Station and pulled her coat closer against a bitter wind. As the crowd thinned out, on to other platforms and down the stairs, she looked for Stacey. She wasn’t waiting at platform level, so Karen followed the signs to the way out and into the open air, where a line of taxis and private cars jostled for space at the pick-up point. After twenty minutes it was clear that Stacey wasn’t coming. Karen couldn’t understand it. She’d left a message on Stacey’s mobile from the train but there’d been no response. There was no queue for taxis. Karen got into a white mini-cab and asked for the hospital.

The automatic doors swished her into an over-heated foyer, where the air hummed with low voices and the squeak of wheelchairs on linoleum. Karen tried to shake off the memory of spending so many hours waiting for her mother in hospitals. She checked a map for directions. At the mortuary, there was a young woman in uniform behind the desk, a nurse or some kind of orderly, Karen wasn’t sure. Fair, straight hair tucked behind her ears, she didn’t look old enough to be dealing with the dead.

‘How may I help you?’

Karen gave her name and Phil’s. The woman frowned and asked Karen to wait a moment. She disappeared through a set of double-doors, panelled with opaque glass, and returned some minutes later.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It seems you may have had an unnecessary journey. Mr Holroyd has already been positively identified by his wife. The body’s been transferred to pathology.’

‘I don’t understand…I’m his sister, she was going to wait for me…’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Please, I really need to see him.’ Karen’s hands were on the desk, tensed, as if she was clawing her way towards the young woman. They didn’t seem to belong to her.

‘I know this is a stressful time, but please, you must understand. We have to follow procedure.’

Karen wandered back through endless corridors feeling numb and nauseous. The sun had gone behind a tall building, leaving a haze of purple light outside the sealed world of the hospital. Beyond the glass doors the cold was a shock for the second time that day. She walked quickly, in what she hoped was the direction of the station. She started to warm up. Stacey’s phone was still switched to voicemail and she gave up leaving messages. When her own phone rang, she pounced on it. It was Max. He’d come home early and wanted to know where she was and where the hell the children were. Karen stood still and looked around her.

‘I’m outside Netto. In Doncaster. The children are at Trisha’s. Phone me again when you’ve checked your messages.’

She cut him off and started walking again, not certain that this was even the right road, but she was past caring. If she kept going she wouldn’t scream. Sweat was prickling her armpits. She remembered that she hadn’t phoned her dad. Maybe she would get Stacey to do that too, since she’d decided to take over. She turned the corner and the railway station was suddenly there in front of her, sooner than she was expecting. She quickened her pace and scanned the departure board: two minutes to get to Platform Five. She wasn’t going to get stuck in this shitty town again. Her legs felt like lead as she ran, but she made it to the train and jumped on board as the whistle blew and threw herself into the first empty seat, gasping for breath, while the station slipped away.

Max hadn’t rung back. She wondered if she should check whether he had picked up the children. The anger she felt towards him was frightening. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t his fault; just ironic that this would be the one day he came home early, to find life going on without him. She toyed with her phone, checking backwards and forwards through her contacts for someone to talk to. She looked out of the window. There was something odd. They passed a town of new houses with an old castle on a hill. This wasn’t on the way to York. The train stopped at a station she didn’t recognise, then announced that the next calling point would be Sheffield.

She looked out at flat rectangles of land, piled with mountains of brick and twisted metal. It had started to rain. One windowless factory was still standing, its jagged roof open to the sky. The feeling of wanting to scream gripped her again. She had managed everything up until now. She had listened to the young officer, the nurse too. She could have screamed at them, but she didn’t. She held herself back, but now she was trapped in this tin box on wheels, going the wrong way through a place which looked as if it had been broken by giants, and the only person she could scream at was herself for getting on the wrong bastard train. There was a packet of tissues at the bottom of her handbag. She put her hand in and scrabbled around for them, not caring that her pens and lipstick were falling out on the seat beside her. She needed to smother what was trying to get out of her.

Her hand caught against the corner of something stiff. She pulled out a Christmas card: green background, hand-painted snowdrops. Did she put this in her bag this morning? She couldn’t remember doing it. There was a phone number. The train was going to Sheffield. He lived in Sheffield. He might be there now. She punched the number in.

‘Hello?’

‘Charlie?’ She didn’t wait for him to reply. Her words tumbled out: about Phil, about the hospital and Stacey, that she was on the wrong train and was on her way to Sheffield by mistake. ‘I can’t believe it, that he’s dead. I needed to see for myself, I’m sorry…’

She kept apologising for laying all this on Charlie, but she didn’t know anyone else she could talk too. She caught her breath and heard Charlie saying he would be there and what time did the train come in? He would be there. He would be there.

In the dark press of winter coats, she saw him straight away, pushing down the stairs to meet her. She tried to hurry towards him, but it was crowded and her legs were heavy, like in a dream where she couldn’t run. When he wrapped his arms around her and held her against his chest, she felt the vibration of his voice. Calming, soothing.

They walked quickly along wet streets. Cars slicked past through the darkening afternoon.

‘It’s not far,’ he said, as they turned a corner into a narrow square of new flats with glass balconies. He led her up a flight of concrete steps, which opened on to a corridor of front doors; each painted a flat, matt, primary colour. They stopped at a red one. He started to apologise that his flat was only small as he fumbled for his keys. Once inside, he took her coat and she wandered like a sleepwalker into a kitchen with a fitted wooden table and bench. Some disconnected part of her brain was marvelling at the clever use of the tight space. There appeared to be a bathroom to the left of the front door and then one other room, which looked like a combined bedroom and sitting room. It was neat and square, with a high ceiling. She couldn’t imagine how Charlie’s long limbs survived without constantly bumping into the furniture.

Books lined two walls and the third was taken up by a magnificent wooden structure. It was a bed on stilts, high enough for an adult to stand underneath. In the centre of the remaining space, a battered brown leather sofa was strewn with notepads and books, which spilled over on to a red Persian rug.

He put his arms round her waist and she turned to face him. He kissed her, very gently, first on the forehead, then the bridge of her nose and her cheeks until they found each other’s mouths. His fingers moved under her shirt, finger to rib, bone to bone. She undid his trousers, and rolled his jeans down over his thighs. Somehow they tripped, still two-thirds dressed, to the sofa. She gathered him beneath her and they didn’t come apart, even when they slid on to the floor.

When it was over, they lay on the rug among the books and papers. He reached back to the sofa for a blanket, and pulled it across them. They didn’t speak for a long time. Then from somewhere outside, she heard the muffled chimes of a church clock. She counted six and checked her watch.

‘You okay?’ he whispered.

‘I had no idea what time it was…’

‘Do you need to go?’

‘I don’t know. No, actually I thought it was later. But I think I need to eat something.’

He disentangled himself from her and the blanket, kissed her hair and stood up. He did up his trousers and walked towards the kitchen.

‘I think I could conjure something up. Omelette?’

‘Sounds great.’

She could hear him in the next room, clattering pans, chopping something, whisking up the eggs. The smell coming from the kitchen was good and she felt calm. It shouldn’t be like this. She rubbed her knuckles into her temples. She ought to feel terrible. But it was as if she had split in two. Somewhere another Karen had a dead brother, a husband and children at home. While in this cube of a room, with its bed on stilts and its battered brown sofa, the present Karen Friedman was glowing from the touch and the taste and the sheer ache of having made love to Charlie Moon. She looked at her bag and told herself to put her hand in for her phone. She had no idea what she was going to say.

Max had already sent a text.
All back home, let me know your E.T.A. shall I keep dinner?
She texted back:
trains running late, don’t wait up.
As she leant into the sofa and pulled her clothes straight, she wondered when she would start feeling guilty.

They sat at right angles at the tiny table in the corner of the kitchen. He watched her, as she plunged her fork into the spongy egg. The omelette was packed with mushrooms and potatoes and seasoned with gritty black pepper and paprika. Her tongue felt alive.

‘You can cook.’

‘I can cook, I can read a book…’ He laughed. ‘I used to read those Dr Seuss books all the time to Sam, my son. You end up thinking in rhymes.’

‘Do you like
Green Eggs and Ham
?’

‘It was Sam’s favourite.’

‘Sophie loved
Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb
– it’s got all these crazy monkeys drumming…’ Her voice trailed off. They’d broken the spell. Their children were in the room, in the middle of the table between them.

He broke the silence. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Just coffee.’ She needed to have her wits about her to get home.

He had his back to her, reaching into cupboards for cups and the coffee jug.

‘Is Sophie your daughter?’

If they’d been fully naked, it would have been obvious that she was a mother. The stretch marks were like tree rings, aging her belly with each pregnancy.

‘Yes, she’s eleven. And my son Ben is six.’ She kept Cara hidden; she was not ready to talk about her. It was not her body, but her dead baby, which seemed like too much of a betrayal of Max.

‘You have a husband.’ He put the coffee cups on the table and poured a strong black stream of steaming liquid.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought perhaps you did. So I didn’t ask.’

‘What about you?’

‘Divorced three years ago. Hence the studio flat. Louise still lives in London with Sam.’

‘Would it have made a difference, if you had asked earlier, I mean?’

He looked into his cup, stirring the sugar into a whirlpool. ‘It might have done. But sometimes we choose not to know things.’

There was the sound of cutlery on china as they ate. Outside a tram went over the points. She knew it couldn’t last.

‘I’m going to have to go.’

‘I’ll walk you to the station. I don’t want you getting lost.’ She was happy to let him worry about her. That felt good too.

It was ten o’clock by the time she got home. There was a light on in the dormer window of their bedroom, but the fairy lights on the Christmas tree were off. Its ghostly shape watched her through the bay window as she found her key. She calculated how many steps would get her to the first floor bathroom. She needed a shower. She’d just bolted the bathroom door when she heard Max on the stairs.

‘That you, Karen?’

‘Yes, sh, don’t wake the kids, I’ll be up in a minute.’

‘You okay? Trisha told me…about Phil. Look I’m sorry I was a bit…’

‘I’m all right. I’ll just have a wee and clean my teeth.’ That was stupid. How could she run the shower without him hearing it? Especially as she was normally a morning shower person. She would have to use the train journey as her excuse.

He was asleep when she got upstairs. Her skin felt clean, her hair too wet to lie down straight away. She turned off the light and sat upright in the dark, listening to the rise and fall of his breathing and the clicking of the cooling radiator, feeling the memory of Charlie’s lips on her lips and his hands on her breasts. In the stillness she felt something lurch up inside her. She thought she was going to be sick. But it was a sound that was trying to get out. She covered her mouth to smother the moan, and found herself sobbing into her hands.

‘So, you found it on a shelf?’ Rick was saying when Sean came back from the bar with the drinks.

Lizzie nodded. ‘Completely dry. A jiffy bag with two wraps of heroin. Hadn’t been touched.’

‘What about the vic, was he a user?’ Sean said.

‘Not according to Huggins.’ Lizzie stirred her gin and tonic thoughtfully. ‘They’re waiting for blood tests, but there weren’t any marks.’

‘Maybe,’ Sean said, ‘it belonged to whoever was working there.’

A man at the snooker table let out a volley of swearing as his target ball veered wide of the pocket. Rick turned and gave the man a look, but Lizzie ignored him. She was fixed on Sean.

‘What do you mean, working there?’

‘The caravan,’ he spoke slowly, not wanting to shout over the pub noise, ‘it was a brothel, wasn’t it? Like the snack bar trailer.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Sean told her about Declan’s brother’s comment. ‘And anyway, Burger said it was in the forensic report.’

She was staring at him now.

‘What’s this?’ Rick said. ‘How come I haven’t seen it? Drug Squad has an interest in this too.’

‘Sean?’

‘Yesterday, Burger said...’ but he ran out of words. He looked into his pint glass and remembered Sandy saying there wasn’t much else and something about waiting for test results. It had taken him three minutes to get upstairs to Burger’s office. At that point there couldn’t have been a mention of a brothel in any forensic report.