Authors: J.M. Gregson
She
did what she had not done in years, not done since the bad old days of twenty years ago, when she had been left in the house for days on end with only toddlers, and had almost left her husband and his whole damned police force. She rang John at work.
‘
Superintendent Lambert?’ said the efficient voice. ‘Yes, I think he’s in his office. I’ll put you through.’
She
realized then that she had been half hoping he wouldn’t be there. It was unusual for him to be available at the station. Unlike most people of his rank, John Lambert did not conduct cases from his office, where the head of the team usually stayed, but went out to the scene of the action. It made him an eccentric in the modern police force. For years, his colleagues had doubted how long such behaviour would be tolerated. But Lambert’s methods had survived the arrival of a new Chief Constable, as many had not expected they would. In the big cases, the murders and the other crimes of violence, Lambert got results. The hierarchy was wise enough to allow him a little licence, as long as he pulled the rabbits from the hat so regularly for them.
He
picked up the phone at the first ring. Christine was scarcely ready for it, wondering if he was going to bite her head off for this unexpected intrusion into that other, working world she had long since resigned to him. She said foolishly, ‘John?’ as if she had not recognized the voice she heard so often on the phone when he rang her.
‘
Christine? What is it? Is it one of the children?’
He
was concerned, not abrupt. For that small kindness, she was absurdly grateful to him. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. Nothing serious really. There’s no need—’
‘
I’ll be home in an hour. Or is it more urgent than that?’
‘
No. There’s no reason for you to come home at all, really. I’m being—’
‘
I’ll be there in an hour.’
‘
I’ll make you some lunch, then. And please don’t—’
But
the phone was down and he was gone. She was immensely relieved that he should have known immediately how anxious she was, that she had not needed to spell out her exaggerated fear to him on the phone.
Endurance
in marriage brought its rewards, in the end.
*
In a smaller house, with a garden much more neglected, on the outskirts of the city of Gloucester, another solitary figure turned another official letter within his hands.
But
Joe Walsh had no one to ring with his news, no figure to bring the reassurance of common sense and proportion into the dark world in which he increasingly lived. It seemed, indeed, so dark this morning that he could detect no chink of light within it. Until he determined upon the one fierce, explosive action he would himself achieve, which would dispel the darkness with a sudden, blinding flash, bringing a blaze of light so brilliant that it would make it impossible to see what lay beyond it.
He
looked again at the House of Commons crest upon the notepaper, at the three short paragraphs which were meant to dismiss his daughter for ever, at the confident, illegible scrawl of a signature which said, ‘I am a busy man and this is all that your daughter is worth to me.’
Already
he could have recited the letter by heart, but he looked again at those phrases which stung his eyeballs like acid: ‘... matter has now been thoroughly investigated ...’; ‘... facts of the incident have been established as clearly as they ever will be ...’; and last and worst of all, ‘ ... can only advise you to reconcile yourself to the fact that this was an unfortunate accident ...’
The
pain on his unblinking eyes was almost unbearable. Then, abruptly, it eased, and the phrases which had been so painful swam before him, as the salt tears sprang from nowhere, brimmed on the lower rims of his eye-sockets, and ran unchecked down his cheeks.
Well,
Mr High-and-Mighty, uncaring, sodding, bloody Keane, there was more than one type of ‘unfortunate accident’. You’ve had your chance and failed, Keane. Just as I knew you would, like all the rest. Now it’s time for your punishment, you smooth bastard, you false, uncaring, fucking friend. I’ve watched you for long enough: now it’s time to act.
He
did not normally use obscenities, and they brought a kind of relief. He went on shouting them for some time at the impassive walls of the silent house, which had ceased to be a home when his daughter had been carried from it in the narrow oak coffin.
He
would get Keane. And without being caught himself. He did not care for his own safety, now that Debbie was gone, but his revenge would only be complete if it went unpunished. The man who had killed Debbie had got away scot-free; when he killed the man who had so miserably failed to avenge her, he would get away scot-free too. The justice of it pleased him. Somewhere in the recesses of his memory, that phrase rang a Shakespearean bell.
Unfortunately,
it was not a warning bell.
John Lambert looked at the letter, his face made longer by the deepening lines of the last few years. To Christine’s great relief, he did not make light of it.
He
made the ritual comfortings, as they both knew he must. ‘Quite a high percentage of people have to go back for a second scan after these mass screenings, you know.’
‘
Yes. Well, not all that high, actually. About four per cent, I believe.’ She had checked that already.
And
how many false alarms were there among those? And how many genuine cases of breast cancer? The questions started up in both their minds, but neither of them wanted them voiced aloud. Christine said, ‘I don’t know why I should feel so cast down by it. I’ve been expecting it somehow, ever since I went to the unit last week for the first screening.’
She
expected him to say, in his knowing, common-sense way, that she was probably imagining that, now that this had happened, that it was a kind of phoney, retrospective knowledge that she had had. Instead, he nodded and said, ‘You were very quiet, the night after you’d been.’
‘
Was I? You’d never have noticed that, you know, at one time. It was the night I agreed to baby-sit for Eleanor, if you remember. I thought you were more excited by the thought of getting Bert Hook hitting a golf ball!’
Suddenly,
she was in his arms. Neither of them knew who had made the first move towards the other. They subsided clumsily on to the big settee, laughing their relief in the contact, seeking out each other’s lips, allowing their mouths to dwell long and tenderly upon each other.
‘
This is a turn-up, cuddling at lunchtime,’ he said eventually, holding her so that they could look into each other’s eyes, smiling his wish that this might be nothing more than a trivial diversion from the steady tenor of their middle age.
‘
Special occasion,’ she said. ‘You don’t have a neurotic wife demanding your attention every day of the week.’ It was true that they were not much given to casual physical contact. They never kissed each other ritual goodbyes in the morning, like some other couples they knew. But now she took his hands from behind her shoulders, and ran them softly over the breasts which were now suddenly so suspect.
He
smiled, an intimate, tender smile, wanting to offer assurance, helpless in the knowledge that he could not. ‘They feel all right to me, lass,’ he said, in a clumsy parody of her northern roots.
‘
Maybe they are. Probably they are. We’ll know soon enough.’ It was she who comforted him now; she felt happier in that role, bred into her over the years, of soothing away childish ills and anxieties.
‘
You haven’t felt any lumps or anything?’ he said, feeling awkward and heavy in his maleness, wanting to tell her he understood this female complaint. Yet how could he ever do that? He wished that one of his daughters could be here, cursed the nature of modern society which split families and took daughters away from their roots to be with their husbands. His concern was all for Christine; and yet he felt helpless, as he never felt in his work.
She
smiled at him. ‘No lumps. It’ll be a false alarm, you see. Just the silly apprehension of a menopausal idiot.’
He
scrambled to his feet, his head bouncing away one of the big tinselled spheres she had hung up for Christmas decorations as she tried to distract herself. ‘Just so long as you don’t stop me getting a golf club into Bert Hook’s big hands,’ he grinned.
‘
Don’t tell anyone else,’ she said as he was at the door. ‘I don’t want your colleagues to know what a panicky old bat you’ve got at home. Sorry I interrupted your day.’
‘
No great matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a quiet time anyway, coming up to Christmas.’
When
he looked back a fortnight later, that seemed the most ironic statement of all.
*
Gerald Sangster went to see the love of his life on that Thursday before Christmas. The hopeless love. He told himself he realized that now, as everyone else had realized it years ago. But his heart would not allow him to let go of Moira Yates, however clearly his brain spelt out the situation to him.
Dermot
Yates tactfully left the pair on their own. He said that he would be glad to get out of the house for a break, to do some belated Christmas shopping. Probably there was some truth in this. The doctor assured him that Moira could be left on her own in the house, but he had not chosen to leave her without company on many occasions as her own reluctance to set foot beyond two or three rooms in the house had become more marked with the passing weeks.
Moira
and Gerald Sangster chatted in desultory fashion through the afternoon. They knew each other well enough not to be embarrassed by the long pauses in their talk. But it was the talk of old friends, rather than the intimate exchanges that Gerald always envisaged and never seemed able to engineer. They were easiest when they talked of the old days, when they had been part of a crowd of young people, when they had been the most gifted of a group who played serious tennis, when he had towed the horsebox around the south of England to the scenes of her various equine triumphs.
Nostalgia
is a powerful pleasure among old friends, uniting them in happy remembrance of times past, reminding them of common interests, mutual friends, and the joyous successes of years gone by. Carefree times, they always seem, in the retrospective glow of that selective memory which is one of the human defences against darker thoughts.
Sangster
brought the conversation back as gently as he could to the present. He tried to explore the depth of Moira’s present depression, for he had researched agoraphobia since she had become its victim, and his reading suggested that depression of some kind lay always behind its fears. Whilst he hinted gently that the only solution lay within herself, she retreated gently behind the fences she had built around her as she had receded into her illness.
When
Gerald was eventually irritated into a more definite suggestion, she turned her eyes for the first time to meet his. He expected anger, and for a moment irritation did flare in those large, near-black pupils which had given him so many sleepless nights over the years. Then she relaxed, grinning at him, teasing in a way he remembered from happier days. ‘You mean I should snap out of it!’ she said.
‘
No, I wasn’t thinking of anything so—’
‘
You’re right, though. It’s what the doctors say, too. They don’t put it as directly as that, of course. They say that, “the solutions to psychological disorders of this kind will most usually be found within the patient herself.” I prefer your version, Gerald, “Snap out of it!”’
It
gave him a ridiculous pleasure to hear her use his name. She had not done it much during the months of her illness. Not knowing what to say, he found himself bumbling on about his lack of medical knowledge, going nowhere.
This
time it was the invalid who had to rescue him. She came across and sat beside him on the sofa in the darkening December room and took both his hands in hers. It was the first time in months that she had volunteered any physical contact with him, and for an instant his blood pulsed in his temples with an absurd hope that it was he who was to be her salvation, he who was to lead her as a lover from the barless prison within which she had caged herself.
It
was the opposite. She looked him again full in the face and said, ‘I will come out of this, Gerald. I can feel that, now. But the rest of my life won’t be spent with you, you know. I’m sorry.’
She
didn’t say any more. Neither of them needed more. He held on to her hands for a full minute, in what he felt now would be the last intimate contact he would ever have with the woman he loved. He did not want explanations. Yet he was driven into words, as much to break the spell of this exquisitely painful silence as in search of explanation. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? Keane!’ He spat the name harshly, as if it were an obscenity.
She
snatched her hands away at that, as he felt he had known she would. Her eyes stared out at the twilight, her profile turned to marble. He felt her seeping away from him as she said, ‘It may be. I don’t know. I think I’m almost rid of him, now. But I can’t live with you, Gerry. I’m sorry.’