The Sad Man (13 page)

Patty digs her gnawed fingernails into the skin of her arm – as hard and deep as she can – and the passenger stumbles closer. Face still hidden, snow billowing around him. There is a yellow pool of light and he is almost there… he steps into it, like an actor moving into a spotlight: Duncan Cobhurn.

He’s not tall but he’s stocky. He looks like a rugby player who’s stopped exercising but still enjoys his food and beer. Mostly bald, just a clipped halo above his ears, black flecked with grey. His face is fleshy and pink – a mix of blood pressure and sun. He has a few days’ growth of beard, which is mostly white. He’s dressed in linen, a stylish white suit that might have looked great in Lisbon but is going to get ruined in the snow. He looks frozen already.

‘Good,’ she thinks. ‘That will make my job easier.’

The clubs are on his shoulder and swing heavily as he walks. He has to stop every few feet to clear away the little snowmen his case keeps building. As he approaches she slowly draws back into the shadows and slides towards her car.

She opens her eyes. She’s back in the hotel room with Duncan Cobhurn – a sedated and bleeding Duncan Cobhurn. The room is stifling. She misses the clean sterile cold of the afternoon. No snowflakes fall here; instead motes of dust dance. She remembers how Dani, when she was about five, believed they were sugarplum fairies dancing in the moonlight. The imagination of a child… It’s just dirt and decay. This room is filthy. The walls are beige but speckled with greasy spots and chocolate-coloured scabs. The ceiling was probably white once, but is now nicotine beige, and
the floor… Christ knows what bodily secretions have seeped into it. There’s a stain, just by the foot of the bed, that she thinks is the spitting image of Gandhi. Now, what would he have done? Forgiven Duncan Cobhurn? She is not Gandhi. She cuts him.

Saturday 18 December 2010

‘Wha––?’ Jim Lancing wakes with a start. No idea where, frozen – panic.

‘Dad.’ Dani is beside him in an instant.

‘I’m okay darling. Go back to your room, I’m fine. It was just a nightmare, just another nightmare.’

‘I should stay.’

‘No, no really. Please Dani. I’m okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Please.’

She nods, a little reluctantly, and leaves him.

He lies back down and concentrates on slowing his heart, pulling himself back from wherever his dream had taken him. He pictures a lake in his mind, mountains surrounding it – a calm place. Slowly the fear recedes and he is himself again. He rubs his hand, it hurts. He looks across at his bedside table. Glowing numbers read 3.42.

‘Damn.’

He really needs more sleep than this, but he knows that won’t happen. He lies there in the dark. On his tongue there’s the faintest taste, and in the air there seems to be something, tangible and smoky, but he can sense it rather than smell it. He feels sweaty from his nightmare and already the prickles of sweat are turning cold; he realises what the taste in his mouth is: blood.

He rolls over onto his side and then out of bed and onto the floor. The first few steps are little more than a hobble until his creaking joints and muscles warm up. He walks down the hallway to the loo. This is the biggest show of how age has crept up on him: that he can’t go through the night without the need to pee. And then, once he’s there, he stands longer than ever before. Sometimes he even sits, like a girl. Tonight he sits immediately, knowing he will be in there a long time. After a couple of minutes he takes a newspaper that’s folded under the sink. He looks at the Sudoku.

‘I haven’t got a pen,’ he calls out.

‘Isn’t there one in the medicine cabinet?’

He looks and finds a stubby pencil in with his razor.

‘Got it. Thanks,’ he shouts to his daughter.

‘Okay,’ she calls back. ‘I’ll be downstairs. Waiting for you.’

He finishes the Sudoku and Killer Sudoku while he’s there, then cleans his teeth, trying to remove the taste of blood. He looks at himself in the mirror and isn’t unhappy with the reflection. He’s got pretty terrible bed-head and his eyes look saggier than usual, but generally he’s not too bad for a man of sixty-four, especially at this time of night. Not gone to seed, like many others he could name – he’s pretty lean. He can bend over and touch his toes without too much huffing and puffing. He would be the first to admit that his stomach isn’t flat like it once was; there’s a slight paunch but it’s not bad, just a little loss of muscle tone to show how gravity hates the old. He rinses his mouth and then runs his wet fingers through his hair. It’s still a pretty good crop, even if it has gone stone grey at the temples and the rest, once raven black, is now dusted with grey. He has always thought his features a little too pronounced, his
nose too big and his mouth too wide, but he seems to have grown into them over the years.

He shivers, the chill of the morning creeping into his bones. He runs a shower, nice and hot, and steps into it. The pressure is strong – it pounds and buffets him, releasing knots.

‘Jim,’ a voice breathes from inside the cascade of water.

‘Patty?’ He strains to hear – can her voice be in the water?

‘Help.’

He feels something deep in his heart – a tug that says something’s wrong with her, his wife. A wife he has barely seen in twelve years. In the churn of the water his nightmare comes back to him.

‘Are you coming down yet?’ she calls up the stairs.

‘Just coming,’ he replies, feeling guilty for not going down before now. He knows how much she longs to talk after a sleepless night, how lonely she gets during the long stretch of darkness. But right now he’s too rattled by the images in his head to talk to her. He tries to push them back inside the box and paste a smile on his face.

‘You need to get down here,’ Dani shouts.

The smile wastes away on his face. He heads downstairs. ‘Where are you?’

‘Hide and seek,’ is her reply.

He finds her curled up in the big leather armchair in the room they laughingly call his den. When she was a child it had been the family dining room. But he couldn’t remember the last time the house had any actual dining in it. Instead the room had become a sort of den-slash-library-slash-watching-the-world-slide-by room. It’s pretty Spartan: two chairs, a small table and an old fish tank. Once, a long time ago, the tank had been home to Dani’s tropical friends but now has some very creepy-looking cacti in among
multi-coloured stones. It’s the only room in the house that’s allowed to be a little untidy. Newspapers are on the floor; he only buys the Saturday
Guardian
and Sunday
Observer
each week but they certainly mount up. Books and correspondence are piled on a small coffee table. Every couple of months he forces himself to sit down and catch up with the world; he should probably do that pretty soon, he thinks.

She turns in the big chair to look up at him. Her long dark hair curling over her shoulder, pale skin flawless and her large brown eyes glittering with excitement. It shocks him a little – probably the aftermath of his nightmare – that she still looks so young. He forgets that sometimes… after all that has happened to her.

‘You okay?’ she asks with a half smile.

He nods a yes.

‘Then sit down and buckle up – you are in for a treat.’

She swings back in the chair to face the doors that lead to the garden. Jim sits in the other, less comfortable chair and angles it to match Dani’s view. Outside it’s black but he can just see someth–– a light snaps on in the garden next door, bleeding across their lawn, revealing an amazing vista. Huge flakes of snow drift on the wind, buffeted and brawling like bumper cars at the fair.

‘Oh my God.’ He’s amazed by the sight.

The two of them sit watching the snow until the sensor light turns off.

‘It’ll go back on soon.’

They sit in the dark, waiting. Jim suddenly thinks of the animals out there: Willow, Scruffy, George and others – guinea pigs, hamsters, cats and two dogs buried over the years in solemn services. He has never seen their ghosts, which he’s glad about. If Scruffy came back to be stroked, like some zombie Disney cartoon, that would scare the life out of him. But he wonders where they are
now. Is there an animal afterlife? Do they have souls like he does, like Dani does?

The light flips back on – catching a squirrel in mid-scurry – and Jim is once more in awe of the scene before him. The snow swirls like the Milky Way, so close he could reach out and touch it.

‘Are you out there, Patty?’ he thinks. ‘Somewhere in the snow?’

Saturday 18 December 2010

Tom stops to get his bearings. Peering into the dark, he can see the mouth of the bridge stretching over the Thames but by halfway across, it fades to nothing. A wall of blackness with snow rippled through it. The streets are empty but for a second he thinks he sees someone walking towards him across the bridge. It looks like… but then there’s no one. Just snow whipped up by the wind. Who? Something scratches at his thoughts, tugging at strands of memories that just refuse to come. For a second, he knows… but it just fades from his mind.

He looks at his watch, it’s 3.42 a.m. Everybody’s asleep, except him.

He turns back to the path and kicks at the snow. For days he’s been dragging a heavy heart along in a sack but now there’s snow. How can anyone feel depressed when faced with this? He feels like a kid who’s bunked off school to see the circus come to town, ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ as the tufts of candyfloss parachute towards him.

‘I love snow,’ he tells the world.

He looks over the sluggish water to the park; it could be anywhere, anywhen. The snow is already quite thick, deadening all sound, building banks and drifts. The moon’s fat, nearly full, but half-hidden behind skyscrapers of cloud. He stands for a long time,
a solitary figure in a snow globe, then finally turns towards the ark of glass that juts out over the river and trudges towards home.

He’s left his car outside her house. He’s already thinking he’ll send a constable to collect it in a day or two, in case she’s watching out her window.

‘What a mistake,’ he tells the snow.

He’d known she was divorced, had two children – and that could have been fine, he’s good with kids. The problem was that he’d not seen how needy she was. They’d had dinner a week ago – she’d drunk a little too much and been a little loud by the end of the evening, but he thought that was nerves. She was at least ten years younger than him, thirty, with long, deep brown hair and tall, long-limbed. That was what had attracted him to her profile. And in her picture she smiled quite beautifully – genuine, unconcerned. Just like
her
smile had been.

‘And?’ he asks himself. ‘The truth?’

Truth? He thinks. It has nothing to do with truth, or admitting anything. He knows why he’d been drawn to this woman. He knows why some women draw his eye and not others. Why he’d turned down at least two women who could have made him happy, who could have loved him. The truth was because he was in love. Still in love after all these years.

And that photo on the website had been so like her. So like Dani. He had made the date, wanting to see her smile again. Except in real life he didn’t see Dani’s smile. Instead there was a thin half-smile, darting across her lips like an apology, and she dipped her head to hide how tall she was. Her voice had grated on him from the start too – rough sloppy diction –
you know
,
you know like
. But dinner had been fine. At the end they had walked to the Tube and she’d leant into him and kissed him. He felt her small breasts push into his chest and a flick of her tongue brush his lips. She called him
the next day and they had agreed to meet again. She invited him to dinner at her place. Stupid. Her place – it was obvious where that was heading. Stupid to go to bed with her. Out of her clothes she was so unlike Dani. She had tattoos, which he hated. From the start she apologised for everything. Sorry for her M&S knickers, the sheets, the children down the hall, her inexperience, how cold her hands were. ‘Next time it will be perfect,’ she whispered in his ear as he pushed himself into her.

Afterwards she went to the toilet. He imagined her in there, crying for her lost life and the desperate compromises she’d been forced to make. He had to get out of the house. When she returned with minty breath, he told her he had to leave, still had a test to prepare for Year Four. He saw her flinch as he lied to her – clearly she was a woman who’d heard a lot of lies and had good radar for them – but he couldn’t bear to snuggle up with her and talk about the future. It actually made it worse that she looked like Dani. Only skin deep though. He smiles at the thought of Dani and his cheeks tighten and ache. His eyes have little frozen lakes in the corners.

It wasn’t his first lie to this woman either. His profile on the dating site says he’s a teacher of history at an under-performing comprehensive. He never tells anyone he’s a policeman. Even those few people close enough to him to know he works for the police don’t know exactly what he does. Only a few other high-ranking officers know he heads a special unit, and that he looks into the eyes of dead girls and promises them he will try to find the men responsible. And he tries. He tries. Detective Superintendent Thomas Bevans. The Sad Man.

He walks, feeling the snow give way under his feet.

‘I should’ve put a bet on a white Christmas – the odds will be useless now,’ he tells the trees.

He loves the silence. Of course, at almost 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning, it is going to be pretty quiet – but the deadening effect of the snow and the low cloud has removed all trace of the world. No music of the spheres. He stops and closes his eyes. He’s a boy again, remembering the first time the silence descended, a truly white Christmas. 1976.

He was eight and pretty sure he’d never seen snow before – not real snow that settles on the ground. But he remembers the rush of excitement that morning, like man had landed on Mars or something. The road outside their flat was amazing. Nothing had driven through it, not even a bike. Pure. Virgin. White. He ran out. His mum was still asleep and he ran and ran through the snow, then turned to see his tracks – the only human being on earth. Until he got to the park. And there she was. He remembers thinking ‘What the bloody hell is she wearing?’ She was in a white nightdress, flimsy and sheer. He could see the curves of her body beneath it – but is that just wishful remembering? No, she was fully clothed underneath, with a big sailor’s jumper. She wore the nightdress over the top. She was lying in the snow waving her arms. He saw her and hid in some bushes, watching. She lay there for a while and then got up and walked away – her dark hair streaked with snow. He waited until she was out of sight and walked over to where she’d lain. There was an angel in the snow.