Approaching Zero (3 page)

“Aw!” It did.

“What about this?” She was pressing Kathy’s cheeks gently but the pain was intense.

“Yeah, it really hurts. Am I okay?”

“Yup, nothing broken, just a few bruises. You might like to steer clear of mirrors for a while, but it’ll clear up in a week or two.”

“Oh.” Kathy didn’t know if she was pleased or disappointed. Surely all of this pain warranted more than a few bruises. She was in agony.

“We’ve given you Paracetamol and we’re going to keep you in overnight just to keep an eye on you, but you should be good to go in the morning.”

“Paracetamol? Can’t you give me anything stronger?”

The nice nurse smiled kindly and said, “I’ll see what I can do. Do you think you might try a little something to eat?”

Kathy paused to see if she was hungry. “Thank you,” she smiled and then a sudden thought hit her. “My bag! Where’s my bag? Tell me someone picked it up! I can’t live without my bag!”

“Okay,” the kind nurse said soothingly. “Just relax, Miss Smith. I’ll see if I can find out for you. Is there anyone I can call for you in the meantime?”

“No, don’t worry about that! I just need my bag!”

Sensing the urgency, the young nurse shuffled away, leaving Kathy with a new set of worries. If her list was lost she didn’t know what she would do. Actually, she knew exactly what she would do: start again. What choice was there? But how many children would suffer because of this oversight? She should have left it at home. Why didn’t she leave it at home? She silently chided herself and the children around her seemed to have got even louder, as if knowing that she just needed five minutes of peace and quiet to gather herself. As if that weren’t enough, she now noticed that some of the other women were clearly talking about her. There was no real malice in them, or she would be able to read their minds. In fact, she had no idea what they were saying, but their low tones and averted eyes every time she turned toward them told her all she needed to know. ‘Poor cow, smashed up face and no kids. Probably beaten up by her husband.’ “You should leave him, luv,” one of them would probably tell her when all of the kids had left. And when would that be? Kathy wondered, scanning the walls for anything resembling a clock. Just how long had she been in this mad house anyway? Too long, she suddenly decided and threw her blue blankets back decisively. She didn’t quite know what she was going to do, dressed as she was in the thin cotton hospital couture, but as the whole room now seemed to be looking at her and whispering, she took the opportunity to drag the curtain around her bed and create a little private room for herself. The curtain may have been thin, but the simple divide seemed to miraculously transport her to a place of calm and quiet.

She briefly looked around the space and found everything she would expect from a hospital bedside: glass of water, from which she took a long sip; bedside cabinet; empty; various buttons encouraging her to express anything from hunger to full-on panic; a rickety chair poised for a visitor; and a pull-out, pay as you go TV. As sorry as all of these accessories were, she maintained her calm as she looked around. Yes, her face hurt like hell; yes, her list may have been lost forever; yes, she was recovering in a crèche; but for the first time since she had opened her eyes she felt just a little bit like her old self, her humor and patience gradually stirring to make the situation bearable. And then
he
came along and spoiled it all.

“Knock knock!” The voice came first and then a man’s hand appeared through the slit in the curtain, holding on to it and saying, “Are you decent?”

Kathy jumped back onto the bed and pulled the blankets over her again. She noticed as she did this that the pain in her face had actually subsided quite a bit. Or maybe she just had so many other things to worry about that it had slipped down the priority list. “Hello?” she said.

“Not the sociable kind, huh?” the voice asked and was accompanied by a head peeking through the curtain. Kathy involuntarily began to assess him, as she did with all men on first meetings, and concluded that he had the bluest eyes she had ever seen. However, his ponytail was something from the eighties and as he revealed his full figure, the jeans, leather jacket, and T-shirt ensemble lost him points. He was handsome in a rugged kind of way, but there was something about him that was immediately unlikable to Kathy. Before he had said a word, she had assessed and rejected him and was now onto the serious business of wondering just who the hell he was to be barging into her cubicle.

“Relax, I’m DCI Spinoza. I’m here to ask you a few questions.”

“Great!” Now she knew what that ‘something about him’ that she instantly disliked had been. “Well, I’m not up to being questioned.”

“Oh, the nurse told me to give you this.” He held out his hand and gave her a single Paracetamol. “See they’ve got you on the hard stuff!” he smiled.

“I wish,” she relented and downed the pill with the glass of water.

“Do you mind if I…?” Spinoza asked, lowering himself onto the chair before Kathy could answer.

“Be my guest.” Kathy turned and caught sight of her reflection in the TV screen. Although it lacked the HD of a mirror, she could see why the little boy had been so alarmed and suddenly felt self-conscious. The fact that she had two black eyes and a swollen, red cheek wasn’t the worst of it—she was in hospital and was expected to have injuries. But her ear-length, dark-brown hair had decided to stand out in all directions and looked like it had a clump of mud stuck in it that no one had thought to take out for her. She looked about fifty years old and didn’t actually smell too fresh she now noticed. She really could have done without the good-looking, badly dressed visitor. But all of this shifted into the background once again when she suddenly turned back to Spinoza and said, “Have you got my bag?”

“Your bag. Hmm. We’ll come back to that. I just want to get a few things straight first, Miss Smith. Now tell me how you came to be riding down St Andrew’s Street earlier.”

“I was on my way home. What’s this about?”

“I think we both know what this is about.”

Kathy’s heart began to beat strangely suddenly. She knew the feeling well from the numerous times she and Brady had been caught red-handed in some kind of trouble. The trick was to remain calm and deny everything until it was completely unavoidable.

“That poor man,” Kathy suddenly realised she should say, but as the words left her lips she could see how unconvinced Spinoza was. He sat open-legged, hands on knees, leaning forward, not necessarily scrutinizing Kathy, but clearly experienced in getting to the truth of things.

“So you didn’t know that Malcolm Scott was a known paedophile?”

Could she risk even more ignorance? “Is that the man I hit?” she asked. “God, I have no idea how I feel about that. Is that why he was at the school? My God! Is he okay, though?”

“He’s still unconscious. He hit his head hard and his leg is pretty mashed up. The doctors won’t know if there’s permanent damage until he wakes up.”

We can but hope
, Kathy thought, but repeated, “My God!” and covered her mouth with her hand, showing that she was now too shocked to speak.

DCI Spinoza just looked at her, half-smiling, waiting for her to speak, perhaps willing to give her enough rope to hang herself. He was about the same kind of age as Kathy, but the years of sloshing through gutters to catch bad guys had weathered and aged him. He was naturally broad, but he clearly worked out, too. As they both sat waiting for Kathy to speak, which she inevitably would, the smell of a surprisingly subtle and stylish aftershave drifted over to her. The leather and denim were disguising a man who clearly looked after himself.

“It was my grandmother’s bike. I don’t ride it out very often,” Kathy began. “To be honest, it’s seen better days, but I just couldn’t get that hill out of my head this morning. I used to bike down it with my friend when we were children and, I don’t know… you must have crazy days like that, DCI Spinoza”—she hoped that using his full name and looking him in the eye would throw him off balance somehow—“when you just want to be a kid again and do things that you used to do. There are so many bad things in life and everyone’s always so serious.”

“And you decided to do this when three hundred children were about to finish school for the day?”

“I wasn’t watching the time.”

“Hmmm!” he said, but he didn’t write anything down or give anything away. “And you were riding on the pavement because…?”

“Because my brakes packed up. I started on the road and then I couldn’t stop. I
did
shout. I would have killed myself if I’d stayed on the road, so I thought if I got on the pavement I could try and slow myself down or throw myself into someone’s garden, I don’t know.” She peeked over to him. Was he buying it? “Anyway, it’s the last time I take the bike out. It’s a death trap.”

“I don’t think anyone’s gonna be riding that thing again.” Spinoza coughed and shifted in the chair and then said, “Of course, I would believe all of this, Kathy—can I call you Kathy?” Kathy nodded. “If I hadn’t spent the last hour reading through the massive file in your bag.”

“You’ve got no right to go through my things!”

“I don’t think that’s the important point here, do you?”

“You’re not suggesting…? I can’t pretend I’m going to lose any sleep over running down a kiddie-fiddler, but I couldn’t hurt a flea intentionally. You’re taking two and two and making a conspiracy. It’s ironic—yes. It’s definitely a coincidence, but what happened was an accident.” Kathy’s voice remained calm and measured. She was doing well.

“But Scott’s on your list, Kathy. How do you explain that? In fact, let’s go back to the beginning. Just what are you doing with a list like that?”

“I’m on sabbatical. I’m a psychologist. I’m gathering data on the behaviour of paedophiles.” Kathy smiled as innocently as she could, but her heart was doing leaps again. She ran a hand through her muddy hair and sighed before continuing. “Research cures diseases, DCI Spinoza, not vigilantism.”

“And where did you get the information? Some of the names on here are protected; they have served their time and are trying to lead constructive lives.
We
wouldn’t have given you their names. So…?”

Kathy urged herself to think quickly but nothing was coming to her. There was no way she could possibly have these names and no excuse to get her out of it. Think! Think! “I would rather not reveal my source.”

“Maybe you’d rather I arrested you and made you tell me?”

“And how would you do that?” she said, trying to win him with sexy again, but her defensive flirting was clearly lost on him.

He gave a little cough again, which seemed to be his way of punctuating a change of approach, and said. “Let’s try this then, Kathy; there are several hundred names in your file, about half of which I don’t recognise and I’ve been working on this for a long time. I don’t understand your colour-coding and ciphers, but I can see that all of these men are lumped together for the same reason. These men are also paedophiles, are they?”

Kathy didn’t answer. Again her brain desperately scanned her mental files for an easy excuse.

“Have these men confessed their urges to you? Or have you got reports from children?”

Again Kathy remained silent.

“You see my problem, Kathy. If you have information and you’re not sharing it with us then we’re both in an awkward situation. It’s going to be even more difficult if you’re taking the law into your own hands.”

Kathy let out another long sigh, the sigh of a woman about to confess, but she stopped herself and instead said, “Jake Spindler, Thomas McCarthy, Davy Schneider, Mark Jones, Tyler McGraf, Brixton O’Neal, Tanya Bolia, Carlos Hughes and Jason Atwood. That’s nine children now isn’t it, DCI Spinoza? Are you any closer to finding them? Or the pervert who’s taken them?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing,” Kathy answered and casually turned to check herself in the TV again. This day was just getting worse and worse. “Maybe if you were better at your job…” She let it hang in the air.

Now it was Spinoza’s turn to sigh.
Unbelievable! Fucking bitch!
he thought, but managed to stay calm and silent.

“What did you say?” Kathy snapped, suddenly turning back to him, going from nought to outrage in less than a second. “I should report you for language like that. In fact, I
am
going to report you for that, DCI. My God, you can’t go around…” But then she stopped herself mid-sentence, noticing how completely lost Spinoza looked. This was a psychic occupational hazard. There were some people whose minds were open books—depraved perverts and paedophilesbut for most people she could only hear or sense the odd angered or bad thought. She always had to be careful that what she was hearing had come from the mouth rather than the mind.

“What the–” Spinoza began but stopped suddenly and tipped his head on the side, much like a dog deciphering its owner’s strange words. Then he turned from her as if he either didn’t notice or didn’t care about her outburst—neither of which could have been true—and pulled himself onto his feet without questioning her about it. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here, Kathy,” he announced as he moved towards the slit in the curtain. “I’m going to advise that you are not charged for the accident. I’m sure that Malcolm Scott will agree rather than explain why he was outside St Andrews.” He paused and scrutinised Kathy for a few more seconds, now looking slightly different in a way that Kathy couldn’t explain. “I’ll be in touch,” he concluded and turned to leave.

“Wait!” Kathy called. “What about my file?”

“I’m happy to keep hold of it for you for the moment. It might help me to be better at my job,” he answered then smiled a not-unfriendly smile and left the cubicle.

Chapter 3

After spending so long complaining about the noise in the ward, Kathy actually missed it when it was gone. As annoying as it had been, the nothingness it left behind was far more difficult to cope with. And then it was suddenly deemed nighttime and the other women, who
had
managed to get their hooks into her about leaving an imaginary, abusive husband, all suddenly went to sleep. The East-end chattering on the TV of the woman beside her had kept her occupied for a while (she didn’t have the money to buy credit for her own TV), but even that had stopped now and a funny kind of silence ensued. It was a silence that the nurses tried to preserve with their hushed laughter and whispered complaints, but the more they tried to be quiet the more impact every sound had and each noise slashed through the room and rattled Kathy to her core. Each snore, sniff, fart, cough, and wriggle from the beds around her was similarly amplified by the enforced bedtime and even if Kathy were exhausted, which she clearly wasn’t, it would have been difficult to sleep. Although a dusky veil of grey was now hanging over the ward as all of the blinds were drawn, it could only have been about 9 p.m. Kathy hadn’t gone to bed at 9 p.m. since she was ten, and even then she would sneak a comic under the duvet with a torch. What was she going to do with herself until they chose a time for her to get up—which would probably be some silly kind of made-up morning time like 5 a.m., just about the time that she imagined being able to get to sleep?