Charity (61 page)

His office was small and cluttered. A gloomy room which befitted his status as a junior partner in the firm of solicitors, tucked away on the second floor of their chambers in the Temple.

Today had started as uneventfully as all other days. He caught the eight-fifteen train from Staines, just as he did every morning. In his pin-striped dark suit, bowler hat, furled umbrella and briefcase, he blended in with all the other City gents who flocked to the City daily. He nodded to men he saw each morning and resigned himself to folding his copy of
The Times
and attempting to read it standing up, as it was a rare day when he managed to get a seat.

It was doubtful he’d have even noticed the small item about a retired colonel found dead in his bed if it hadn’t happened in Oxford. He idly wondered whether ‘suspicious circumstances’ meant the man had been poisoned, shot or strangled, then moved on to something else.

Had it not been for Simon, one of the articled clerks, he probably wouldn’t have heard anything more about the case for a day or two.

‘Wouldn’t mind a bedside vigil with her myself!’ Simon was saying, to giggles from the typing pool, hanging over a copy of the
Daily Mirror
. Simon fancied himself as a ladies’ man, despite the fact that he was only five foot three with a round, chubby face. Hugh paused, more from amusement at Simon’s schoolboyish glee than interest in the object of his admiration.

‘Blonde or brunette?’ he asked, fully expecting Simon to report rapturously on the girl’s vital statistics. ‘Has she got big ones?’

‘You men are so insensitive.’ Judy the older of the two typists, a bookish girl with glasses, looked offended. ‘The poor girl’s in hospital fighting for her life. How can you treat it so lightly?’

Hugh moved closer to the paper on the desk, but even as he read the headline
POLICE IN BEDSIDE VIGIL
, the picture beneath it of a beautiful blonde woman made his head spin. He sat down with a bump on a typing stool.

‘I say Hugh, you’ve gone as white as a sheet!’ Simon said. ‘Do you know her?’

Denial was instinctive.

‘Just for a moment I thought I did.’ Hugh forced himself to smile. ‘One too many drinks last night!’

He left the typing pool seconds later, but instead of going to his office went out into the street to buy another copy of the paper.

It was like having twelve years stripped away. Hugh’s heart was pumping and his palms were sweaty. In his head Charity had stayed as she’d been when he saw her ride off on her bike that last day at the cottage, boyishly slender in little blue shorts, her hair long and straight, her sweet innocent face distorted by tears.

This other Charity looked to be a beautiful woman, with a coolly distant expression and a harder look in her eyes.

*

It was five in the afternoon before he had time to get his thoughts together. All day between court appearances, reading briefs and interviewing two clients, Charity had been flitting through his mind. He could recall every detail about that summer romance. He’d often relived it in his mind and had been surprised at how long she stayed with him, despite the number of other girls he’d slept with at Oxford.

Hugh had always been considered a lucky chap. He had breezed through school and Oxford effortlessly, liked by almost all his tutors, looked up to by other students and very successful with women. But somehow, somewhere along the line a light had gone out, and he’d lost his glow.

Marrying Sophie Alton had been perhaps slightly influenced by the fact that Beresford, her father, was a High Court judge, but Hugh had honestly thought he loved her at the time.

The temptation, based on his teenage memory, was too strong. His hand strayed to the phone. The least he could do was check out how badly hurt she was and maybe discover how involved she was in the death of her uncle.

Half an hour later Hugh was still in his office. He was aware he’d missed his usual train home and that Charles Sommerville, a colleague, was coming to dinner. His police contact said she was badly injured, that she had no memory of driving anywhere.

‘Oh Hugh, I’m furious. You are naughty being late tonight.’ Sophie came out of the kitchen as he stepped into the hall. ‘Charles and Hilary will be here in five minutes and I was expecting some help.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Hugh put his umbrella in the stand by the door and kissed her proffered cheek. He was tempted to say that she’d had all day to prepare dinner. Cooking for two old friends wasn’t exactly beyond a woman who boasted she could knock up a cordon bleu meal in half an hour, and she had a daily woman in anyway. ‘What needs doing?’

‘Nothing now,’ she sulked. ‘I’ve even opened the claret. You’d better get changed.’

Sophie’s prettiness was of the chocolate-box variety: strawberry blonde, with pink and white skin and a hint of freckles on her slightly upturned nose. In a long, pintuck-bodiced Laura Ashley dress, she was a real Home Counties girl. She liked everything to be perfect, a kind of romantic dream in soft focus. Ruffles on every flower-sprigged curtain, a profusion of cream lace and gentility.

Hugh had made no protests as each room in their mock-Georgian house was transformed into pretty feminine perfection. Sophie scoured antique shops for the stripped pine furniture, studied the glossy magazines for further inspiration to create an image of Edwardian fussiness. But tonight as he went into their bedroom and saw the satin and lace-trimmed pillows strewn on the canopied bed, he had a desire to sweep them all off. Open the window to let out the smell of pot-pourri, and untidy those perfectly placed bottles of expensive perfume.

A dark blue velvet frame trimmed with ribbon on his chest of drawers held a photograph of Sophie in her wedding dress, with beside it a small crystal vase of freesia. He took out his gold cufflinks, put them into the tiny tray left for the purpose and winced at the photograph.

Their wedding day had been the first time he had realised how entirely self-centred Sophie was. Everything from her ridiculously expensive dress to his top hat and tails, the open-topped vintage car and even her lace parasol had been designed to show herself off. He had been well down her list of priorities that day.

‘Damn you,’ Hugh muttered as he went into the bathroom for a shower. He wasn’t sure if he meant Charity for invading his thoughts again, or Sophie for not turning out to be quite the loving partner he’d expected.

Hugh slipped away to his study while Sophie was showing Charles and his wife some holiday snaps, using the excuse that he had to telephone a client urgently.

‘How the hell are you, Rob?’ he said, quite forgetting he had neglected his old chum shamefully over the past ten years. ‘It’s Hugh! Long time no see!’

He kept up the lighthearted banter for some minutes before he began to realise that Rob didn’t sound particularly pleased to hear from him.

‘Look, I’ll get to the point, old man,’ he said, having the grace to blush a little. ‘Have you seen the papers today? Charity – you remember her, don’t you? – Well she’s had a bad car accident, and you being a doctor, well I thought you’d be well placed to find out how she is.’

Dr Robert Cuthbertson put the phone down and for a moment he was too stunned by the news from Hugh to even think.

‘Charity,’ he said aloud.

He could recall a picture of her as clearly as if he’d seen her this afternoon. Yet it was twelve years ago when he’d stood at the cottage door and seen her for the first time.

She’d been wearing a pink cotton dress that day; her legs and arms bare and her long blonde hair windswept from riding her bike. Her smile was as shy as his own and he remembered being acutely aware of his acne and his weedy frame, next to Hugh’s teen idol perfection.

Charity had stayed in Rob’s head and heart long after his tan from that summer had faded and he couldn’t count the times he’d ridden his bike up past Bowes Court school with the faint hope he might just run into her.

He stood up, leaving his sitting room to get the telephone directory from the hall, but as he saw his reflection in the hall mirror he was again reminded of how much time had passed and the changes that must have taken place in all three of them.

Rob had had a spurt of growth after that summer. Now he was a presentable five feet ten, and no one, not even wonderboy Hugh Mainwaring, could accuse him of being a weed any longer. Rob could never have been described as handsome – his fair hair flopped, he got freckles in the sun and there wasn’t one remarkable feature in his face – but his patients responded to him, nurses claimed he had a kissable mouth, and it was a face that seemed to improve with maturity.

Rob’s life hadn’t turned out a bit as he’d supposed it would that summer in the cottage. He didn’t even get to Oxford. When his mother came back from Italy she’d collapsed with a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide, so Rob stayed at home instead. It was during this time as he helped look after his mother that his whole outlook changed and he decided to become a doctor. He got a place later in a pre-medical course at St Bart’s in London, but it wasn’t until six years later, still at St Bart’s doing his pre-registration year, that he realised medical or surgical work wasn’t for him, but psychiatry. Now he was a senior registrar at Colney Hatch mental hospital.

Rob lived at Albemarle Mansions, a quaintly Victorian block of flats just off Baker Street. His grandmother had bought the flat for him for his twenty-first birthday, though she never understood why he wanted such an odd, old-fashioned place, aside from it being a smart address.

But then Rob loved the odd, the unexplained, even the bizarre; that was why he liked psychiatry. His flat was like a rabbit warren: long narrow passages, peculiar shaped rooms, an impractical place with great character.

He’d furnished it with antiques from his grandmother, not because they were valuable, but because he loved to have memories of her and they looked right here. Girlfriends said the place was creepy, but that was because he seldom remembered to replace light bulbs. His work at the hospital didn’t give him much time for tidying up. In his sitting room books were piled on the floor, a mountain of papers spilled over his desk, and his bedroom was even worse.

After Rob had rung the Ealing hospital he sat at his piano and began to play. He had been working his way through Beatles numbers for some weeks, but he found it ironic that the one he picked tonight was ‘Girl’.

‘She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry, but you don’t regret a single day,’ he sang softly.

PC Jim Baker was bored stiff. He couldn’t think why they were still mounting a twenty-four-hour guard on Charity Stratton as it was patently obvious she has neither the strength nor the inclination to run away.

The sound of feet made Baker turn in his seat, stifling yet another yawn. A man was walking purposefully along the corridor towards him carrying a huge bunch of flowers.

He stopped, looking at the door of the private room, then back at Baker.

‘May I see Miss Stratton?’

‘Who are you?’ Baker asked. The man was around the same age as himself, with fair hair neither fashionably long nor a decent short cut, and a worn brown leather jacket but for some reason the clipped public school voice irritated him. Maybe it wasn’t the voice so much, more that the man looked far more youthful than he felt himself.

‘Dr Cuthbertson. May I see her?’

The title ‘doctor’ immediately made Baker feel intimidated, yet at the same time the bunch of flowers and the man’s leather jacket meant he wasn’t visiting in a professional capacity.

‘I’ve had instructions not to let anyone in but close relatives.’ Baker’s tone was a little churlish.

Since Miss Stratton regained consciousness, Baker often went in for little chats with her. At first they had been pure duty: questions designed to get her to open up, maybe even get a confession. Detective Inspector Fleming didn’t believe she remembered nothing about the evening prior to her accident, but Baker did, now.

As unprofessional as he knew it was, Baker saw himself as a friend, not a gaoler. Fleming and some of the other officers involved with the case might see her as a high-flying businesswoman who’d cracked and killed her uncle because of some family feud. But Baker’s gut reaction was that she was merely a lonely, disturbed woman who just happened to crash her car in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

‘Have any of her close relatives been?’ Robert asked, his question worded in such a way it sounded like a challenge.

‘Well no,’ Baker admitted reluctantly. ‘Not yet anyway. Only Rita Simpson who works for her.’

‘I’m quite safe,’ Robert said, picking up that this burly policeman had become protective towards his charge, just as he did with many of his troubled patients. ‘Look, if you’re doubtful about me, contact Dr Mead the registrar, I spoke to him last night. I’m not just a doctor, but an old friend of Charity’s.’

‘OK, go on in.’ Baker nodded his head towards the door. ‘But you’d better give me your name and address.’

Robert gave the information.

‘How is she doing?’ he asked, his hand on the door.

‘Up and down.’ Baker shrugged his shoulders. ‘She tries to keep a brave face, but since she heard about her uncle –’ he paused, unable to admit how often he’d heard her crying when she thought no one was around.

Robert stood for a moment just inside the door, overcome by an unexpected rush of emotion.

He had seen countless patients with far worse injuries than he knew Charity’s to be. But she was unrecognisable. Her entire face, neck and the parts of her arms and hands not hidden by either her nightdress or plaster were covered with cuts and both her eyes were blackened and swollen. Her head was swathed in bandage and the plastered arm held still on a rest; even her shape was concealed by a frame over her legs.

There was a basket of flowers on the windowsill, a vase of carnations on the locker and just two get-well cards beside it, a pitifully bleak collection.

‘Hallo Charity,’ he said, approaching the bed. ‘Remember me?’

One swollen eye opened a little wider and he saw a flash of brilliant blue.