Watching You (15 page)

J
oe walks along the river toward Chelsea Bridge, listening to the sound of water slapping against the granite walls. His shadow shortens and lengthens as he passes each streetlight. On the southern approach to the bridge he notices flashing lights. Fire engines and ambulances have surrounded the base of an apartment building on the edge of the water. A police launch is trawling that stretch of the river, looping back and forth. In the uppermost apartment he sees a flashgun firing and figures moving behind the glass.

His mobile is vibrating. He recognizes Julianne’s number, but knows that Emma will be calling. She rings him every evening before she goes to bed and tells him about her day and asks when he’s coming home as though “home” is with her and Charlie and Julianne in the cottage in Wellow. He can only wish.

Joe stops and sits on a bench, listening to Emma’s news.

“My friend Sadie says that if you kiss a boy you have to marry them and have babies,” she says with a slight lisp.

“Not exactly.”

“Good.”

“Have you been kissing boys?”

“Ew! Yuck!” She giggles, but grows serious again. “Is it hard to fall in love?”

“That’s a pretty big question for someone who’s only seven.”

“I’m seven and a half.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I just do.”

“Well it depends. It was very easy to fall in love with your mother and very hard to fall in love with anyone else.”

“Is it harder than learning to read?”

“For some people.”

“Does it take that long?”

“Sometimes.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Joe has to blow “sloppy kisses” down the line and say goodnight a half dozen times. Sometimes he talks to Charlie on these same calls, but tonight she’s doing homework. And if he’s really lucky, he might get a few minutes with Julianne before Emma calls out to her. He likes those moments. He tries to think of funny stories to tell her because he’s convinced that laughter will win her back. When she stopped laughing she stopped loving him.

She comes on the phone.

“Charlie had a nice time in London.”

“Good.”

“She said you had Vincent over for dinner.”

“We did.”

There is a slight pause. “Charlie said you’d also found a new friend.”

“Who?”

“Your neighbor.”

“Oh.”

“Apparently she’s very pretty.”

“She’s married and she’s a patient.”

There is a pause. The statement was too abrupt. Joe softens his voice. “Her husband has gone missing. I’m trying to help her.”

“That’s nice,” says Julianne, embarrassed now. “Charlie didn’t mention that. I thought you might have found someone.”

“I did find someone. I married her twenty-four years ago.”

Julianne sighs. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Maybe we should make one of those pacts,” says Joe.

“What sort of pact?”

“If neither of us has found someone after a certain amount of time, we get back together.”

“How long did you have in mind?”

“Next weekend.”

She laughs. He loves to hear the sound. That used to be enough. He was never the most handsome or the richest or the best lover, but he could always make her smile.

Julianne says goodnight. Joe puts the phone away and gazes across the water at the flashing blue lights, wondering what crime has touched another set of lives.

At the edge of his vision, he notices someone on the bridge, standing away from the streetlights. Silhouetted against the soiled light, frozen in a pose, the figure looks flat and two-dimensional, like he’s been cut out of cardboard.

Joe’s left arm is jerking spasmodically, his medication wearing off. He should have taken a pill earlier. Feeling in his pocket, he searches for the small white plastic bottle. Managing to get it open, he swallows the pill dry, waiting for the chemicals in his brain to rebalance.

From further along the footpath, he hears voices; young men, drunk, laughing and jostling each other. Two of them pass. The last is metal thin with black hair and fuzz on his chin. He pretends to trip, spilling his beer.

“What did you do that for?”

Joe looks up. The man is dressed in a Chelsea football strip, jeans and thick-soled work boots.

“Excuse me?”

“You spilled my fucking beer.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

Joe stands with difficulty. He can’t stop himself rocking from side to side like he’s a sea captain standing on the bridge of a ship. His left arm spasms.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

This seems to amuse the man. “You think I’m looking for trouble?”

“I didn’t say that.”

The others have turned back. Joe’s right hand opens unconsciously and his white pill bottle bounces across the asphalt and rolls toward a grated drain. One of them places his heel on the bottle. Joe’s tongue has grown fat and lazy in his mouth making his words thick and wet. “Please don’t do that.”

“You a retard?” asks one of them.

“No.”

“I hate retards.”

The smallest of them has dreadlocks and eyes like black glass beads. “Maybe you’re one of those perverts who hang about waiting to flash women who walk by. Are you a pervert?”

The boot presses down, crushing the bottle and grinding the contents into a powdery dust that seems to glow in the darkness. The footpath has become a dangerous place with bitter air and sour light. Joe glances in both directions. Nobody is coming.

“I’ll buy you another beer,” he says to the ringleader.

A finger pokes him in the chest. “You didn’t answer the question—are you a pervert?”

Joe’s fists have closed, stopping the tremor. He can feel his nerves fizzing and popping under his skin like bundles of electrical wires.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks, his words clearer, addressing the Chelsea supporter. “What are you trying to prove?”

“Huh?”

“Who are you trying to impress?”

“What are you talking about?”

Joe has found his voice again. Medicated. On. “You’re mid twenties, unemployed, still living at home because you can’t afford to move out. You do odd jobs, getting your hands dirty so you can buy cheap lager, cigarettes, and the bags of white I can see crusted around your nose.”

The youth’s eyes have widened, but he doesn’t know how to react.

“You can’t get a girlfriend, so you hang out with these losers, trashing bus shelters and rolling drunks, because it’s always someone else’s fault that they’re richer and better looking and more successful with a pretty girlfriend and a nice car. So you go out and get pissed and you come across a man with Parkinson’s Disease and you decide to pick on him. You want money? Take my wallet. You want respect? Give a little.”

There is an echoing silence, a tremor in the air. The ringleader runs his tongue over his upper lip. The dreadlocked one keeps looking from face to face, as though waiting for a signal.

For a moment, Joe thinks he might have shamed them into leaving him alone, but they’re too drunk or stupid to understand.

“You’re gonna fucking swim for that,” says the Chelsea supporter, letting out a roar and driving his shoulder into Joe’s chest, sending him backwards until he hits the stone wall guarding the river. Someone picks up his legs, tipping him upwards, arching his body over the water. He hears another sound.
Ooomph!
Air leaking. Punches landing. Groans. The fight only lasts a few seconds before the young men are running, their boots echoing into the night.

A man is crouching next to Joe. “You OK?”

“Can’t breathe!”

“Wind got knocked out of you.”

The stranger helps him stand and brushes dirt from his coat.

Joe feels for his wallet. It’s still in his pocket.

“Do you want to call the police?” asks the stranger.

“Won’t do any good.”

“All the same, you should report it.”

“I’ll call from home.”

Joe’s left hand keeps opening and closing, adrenalin overriding the drugs. He concentrates on trying to slow his heartbeat.

Across the water, a police helicopter is hovering above the apartment block. The stranger walks with Joe to the bridge, climbing the stairs to the main road.

“Thank you.”

“It was nothing.”

“No, I mean it, I owe you my thanks, I don’t even know your name.”

Joe fishes a business card from his wallet. A cab slows. The door opens. He wants to shake the man’s hand and thank him again, but the cab door is already closing and the vehicle moving away, leaving behind the faintest aroma of petrol and bleach.

Ruiz is waiting for him in a pub where the barmaid has thick black eye shadow and spiky blue hair that angles like a sundial from the top of her head. She looks intimidating until she opens her mouth and lets slip a posh St. Trinian’s school accent.

He likes this place. It has clean pipes and real ale and he knows most of the regulars—by sight, if not by name. The skinny ex-jockey at the end of the bar once rode a Grand National winner, while the red-nosed accountant does Sudoku puzzles all day, waiting for closing time so he can go home and wait for opening time.

“What do you mean, you got beaten up?”

“Just what I said.”

“They didn’t rob you?”

“No.”

“Are you all right?”

“Shaken not stirred.”

Joe tells him the whole story of the confrontation and rescue.

“Who was the guy?”

“No idea, but if it weren’t for him, I’d be swimming.”

“You’d be drowning.”

“Maybe.”

Ruiz can’t understand how Joe can be so philosophical about it. The professor is always making excuses for mindless violence, blaming it on deprivation, boredom, and neglect, but these people don’t deserve to be defended. They’re animals. They ape, they parrot, they hunt in packs, picking on the weak because they’re cowards. And when caught, they stand before judges while their defense lawyers make impassioned speeches about their clients’ shitty childhoods and terrible luck. And they walk free, grinning and chest-bumping each other, ready to fuck up someone else’s life.

Ruiz buys Joe a shot of whisky and insists he drink it. Then the two men take a table outside near the river, smelling the briny pong. Ruiz belches quietly, gazing up at stars that are barely visible in the ambient light from the city.

“I miss looking at the night sky,” he says. “When I smoked, I used to do it a lot…sit outside and contemplate the great unknowns.”

“God?”

“He’s a little too unknown for me.”

Ruiz blows his nose on a handkerchief, which he folds and puts into his trouser pocket. “How well do you know Marnie Logan?”

“Why?”

“I’m concerned we might be working for the wrong side.”

Joe waits for an explanation.

“People have a habit of disappearing or dying around her. Maybe she killed her husband. Maybe she murdered Quinn.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Something doesn’t smell right.”

Ruiz tells Joe about Richard Duffy—Telecom engineer, rower, date-drug rapist, and ultimately Thames flotsam.

“She withdrew the complaint and within a month the guy was found floating in the river.”

“Was she questioned?”

“The coroner came in with an open verdict.” Ruiz empties his Guinness and wipes his lips. “I hate to say I told you so, but I always had doubts about that woman.”

Joe doesn’t answer.

“You like the lady, I get it.”

“It’s not that.”

“What then?”

Joe talks of his sessions with Marnie. Despite her remoteness, she had never seemed dangerous or prone to violence. She was more like an open wound who shied away from being touched or examined too closely. The past twenty-four hours had revealed different opinions and perhaps another side to her personality. Psychopaths and narcissists can bear grudges for years because it challenges the way they see themselves. Their hatred is so pure it sustains them. It cleanses them of wrongdoing and justifies their worst behavior, but Marnie Logan isn’t a psychopath or a narcissist. She’s damaged and vulnerable, yet unselfish and fiercely protective of her children.

“What about the break-in?” Ruiz asks.

“Marnie wouldn’t steal her own clinical notes. What reason would she have?”

Ruiz stares at his empty pint glass, studying the way the foam is drying in patterns. “I went to see Patrick Hennessy today. Showered twice and still feel dirty.”

“What did he say about Marnie?”

“Said she was madder than a midget with a chainsaw. He warned me to be careful.”

“Of him?”

“Of her.”

Pulling Daniel’s diary from his pocket, Joe looks down the list of names. So far he’s spoken to Eugene Lansky and Olivia Shulman, who both claimed that Marnie had “ruined their lives.” People exaggerate. Old scars are slow to heal. Petty feuds get blown out of proportion.

“We still haven’t spoken to Calvin Mosley,” says Ruiz, “although from experience ex-husbands are rarely unbiased.”

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

“My second wife is going to squat over my grave instead of dancing.”

Joe wants to laugh, but he’s too exhausted.

“I’ll take the ex-husband,” says Ruiz. “What are you going to do?”

“Marnie didn’t recognize two names on the list—a Dr. Sterne and a Francis Moffatt. I’ll start with the doctor.”

The two men say goodbye and Ruiz watches the professor crossing the road and hailing a cab. He’s hunching more these days. Perhaps the Parkinson’s is accelerating. Ruiz had never paid much attention to his own health. As a rugby player he’d been fearless, charging into rucks and mauls, unconcerned about his personal safety. As a detective he knew how to physically intimidate, but rarely had to test himself. Disease, like old age, is something he dreads having to fight because he can’t see it in front of him. He can’t tackle it into the mud or lock it in a police cell.

How would he shoulder a burden like Joe’s? Would he cope as all sufferers cope—because he had no choice—or would he crawl into a hole and never come out?

The breeze swirls around him, whispering in his ears, but the answers do not come.