Betrayal (41 page)

He was waiting for more, so I told him about the drug running. ‘I don’t know how regularly they brought drugs across the Channel, but Sylvie had a contact in Cherbourg. He supplied her with a large packet containing some sort of powder. Heroin or cocaine, I imagine.’ Tingwall shot me a dart of surprise and what might have been disapproval.

‘I have no idea what she did with the drugs once she got them to England. But I have a theory – I think she may have kept them on
Ellie Miller
. I think she may have been using
Ellie
as a – what’s the word? – a cache. And
that’s
why she went to the boat that day. And that’s why she was killed. Maybe she fell out with someone further along the line. Maybe she hadn’t paid someone. Maybe she’d been bringing in extra drugs that she hadn’t been telling them about.’

Tingwall had stopped writing. ‘You’ve no evidence for this?’ he asked quietly.

‘No. But I can’t think of anything else. She was bright, you see. She knew they were sniffing around.’

‘They?’

‘The customs.’

Tingwall put his notebook down. ‘I wish you’d told me some of this before,’ he murmured.

‘Didn’t think it would look too good on my CV,’ I replied flippantly. ‘You know – aiding and abetting the smuggling of drugs. And if I were to say that I’d got involved unwittingly, that I didn’t know what was going on – the innocent abroad – well, do
you
ever believe that old chestnut when you read it? No, neither do I.’

Tingwall was contemplating this with a dispirited expression when Ginny reappeared. He straightened up, shuffled his feet and smiled boyishly. Which seemed to make two of us who were rather in love with her.

I drove Ginny straight on to Bristol for one of her twice weekly appointments with Dr Jones. During the journey she fell into a listless uncommunicative mood, and I couldn’t make out if it was the bad night she’d had or a sudden bout of depression. As we’d got ready for bed she’d become restless and preoccupied, and several times during the night I’d woken to find her gone from the room. Her absences weren’t good for my jittery imagination, and twice I’d set off in search of her. The first time I’d found her in the kitchen, staring out of the window into the darkness while the kettle boiled untended on the Aga. An hour later I’d discovered her scrubbing the kitchen table. ‘It hasn’t been cleaned properly,’ she’d complained matter-of-factly. ‘Liquid and bleach. You can never get rid of the grease marks without liquid and bleach.’ She’d seemed completely unaware of the echoes in this, there was no glint of comprehension, and a warning had begun to tick away in my mind. Feeling out of my depth, I’d remembered the forthcoming visit to Jones with a rush of relief.

The psychiatrist had his consulting rooms in a semi-detached villa in the Kingsdown area of Bristol, not far from the university and the hospitals. Drawing up outside, I said to Ginny, ‘If I’m delayed, you won’t mind waiting a bit?’

She shook her head and fumbled with the contents of her handbag. I went round and opened the door for her and helped her out. She kissed me absently on the cheek before climbing the few steps to the door and ringing the bell. Watching her pass into the house, I wondered if she would come clean with Jones about the self-appointed reduction in her drug regime, and whether I would be betraying her trust if I contacted him later to find out.

With a street map of Bristol propped against the wheel, I set off in the direction of Clifton. I got lost almost immediately, going down a hill I had climbed just minutes before, but after stopping to get a new perspective on the map managed to put myself back on the right road, and within ten minutes was crawling along the busy street where Jean-Paul lived, squinting at the street numbers. Number nineteen was a flat-fronted terraced house, three storeys high with grimy windows and peeling white stucco and rubbish spinning around the front steps. There were names against three of the bells, none of them Mathieson, so I pressed the fourth, which was labelled Flat 2.

A dog yapped frantically somewhere near by, a succession of heavy vehicles shuddered past on the road behind. I pushed the bell again. I was wondering whether Jean-Paul had changed his mind when the door swung open and he was there, a tall figure standing well back from the threshold. I was surprised at how little he had changed. He was still a string bean of a man with a pinched face, a thatch of dark hair and heavy brows drawn into a permanent frown. He still wore his hair long and his jeans tight, though after fifteen years he had less of the hungry student about him and more of the lean cerebral air of the academic. I saw no resemblance to Sylvie until he stepped back to let me in and then something in his profile, the set of his mouth, gave me a shudder of remembrance.

‘Good of you to see me,’ I said as he pushed the door shut with a slam that shook the house.

Jerking his head towards the stairs he led the way up to the first floor. His flat consisted of one large room spanning the full width of the house with an open-plan kitchen in one corner, a bed in another, and a door leading to what was presumably the bathroom. Overloaded bookshelves sagged along every wall, and more books were stacked in untidy piles in and around the massive Victorian desk which stood before the windows, its surface almost lost in paper. Mozart was playing softly in quadraphonic sound.

Jean-Paul faced me in the middle of the room. ‘So?’ he said abruptly.

I hadn’t planned this in any detail. ‘First, may I say how sorry I am—’

He flicked an impatient hand. ‘Think we can skip that bit.’

I understood this, perhaps I had half expected it. I began again, no more confidently, ‘I assure you that my wife did not do this terrible thing. They’ve got it all wrong. It’s the most appalling mistake.’

‘So you said on the phone.’ His manner was cold.

‘The thing is . . . I’m trying to find some of the people who knew Sylvie, to see if they can think of anyone . . . of any reason . . . I was wondering if you could put me on to some of her friends, people who saw her this summer. I thought they might be able to tell me – I don’t know – whether anyone had been bothering her in any way . . . following her . . . That sort of thing.’

He raised a dubious eyebrow and, perching himself on the edge of the desk, said in a voice that was heavy with indifference, ‘She didn’t tell me much. I didn’t see her that often.’

‘Anybody you can think of. Anything she told you.’

He exhaled irritably as though he was already regretting having agreed to see me. ‘All I knew was that she was living in Dittisham, that she was doing her sculpture or whatever it was.’

‘Did she mention Hayden, the person she sailed with?’

‘May have. Don’t remember.’

‘Or Joe, the chap she shared the cottage with?’

‘A bit.’

‘What was his second name, do you know?’

He gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘Wilson. Willis. Wilkins. Something like that.’

‘You don’t know how I could get in touch with him, do you?’

His eyes glimmered coldly. ‘Maybe.’

‘You’ve got a number?’

‘He may not want to talk to you.’ His tone made it clear he thought this highly likely.

‘But could you ask him anyway? Explain how important it is.’ Before he could refuse, I pulled out a card and, balancing it on my hand, scribbled my home and mobile numbers on the back. ‘I’d be most grateful.’

With the bad grace that seemed to be habitual to him, Jean-Paul dropped the card onto the clutter of papers on the desk behind him, where it sank, a small white rectangle, into a sea of white.

‘Did she mention any other people?’ I asked. ‘Not just in Dittisham, but elsewhere. In London perhaps.’

‘Not really. She had friends all over the place.’

‘What about business associates?’

‘
Business?
’ he repeated scornfully. ‘What sort of
business?
’

I plunged in. ‘Drugs.’

He tossed his head angrily. ‘Oh,
please!
’

‘They say she was involved in hard drugs.’

‘Who says!’ he retorted. ‘That’s crap. She was into hash, a bit of speed maybe. Nothing more. Who says?’

‘The police.’

‘Rubbish. They never told you that. Who told you that?’

‘The hash,’ I said, avoiding the question, ‘where would she have got it from?’

‘Where anyone gets their stuff from.’ He was talking to me as if I were a complete imbecile. ‘Everywhere.’

‘I wondered if perhaps she could have fallen out with the dealer.’

He gave a harsh contemptuous laugh. ‘You’ve been watching too many bad films. People don’t get killed by their hash suppliers, otherwise half the university would be decimated. What were you thinking – that she owed somebody money and they killed her for it? Listen, hash costs nothing, and everyone pays up front anyway. Or if they do get credit, it’s never for very long or for very much, believe me.’ He gave his derisive laugh again. ‘Christ, what a pathetic idea.’

I hesitated, remembering the feel of the package around Sylvie’s waist the night she dived into the water. ‘Once she had something else. A powder.’

His eyes flashed with hostility. He was trying to gauge whether I’d sprung this on him on purpose. ‘So?’ he said tightly.

‘I thought she might have got mixed up with the dealing side.’

He buttoned down his mouth and glared at me by way of a reply. The Mozart came to an end, and there was only the faint rumble of traffic and the tick of a central-heating pipe.

‘Her friends,’ I said, bringing us back to less contentious ground. ‘Was there anyone she was particularly close to?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Who, do you know?’

‘I told you – she had friends all over the place.’

‘What about boyfriends?’ I asked, holding my expression.

‘She told me about one, yes.’

Concealing my leap of curiosity, I said, ‘Oh? Who was that?’

‘You.’ He had enjoyed that moment, he had enjoyed catching me out.

I gave a slow nod which he could take as a tribute to his little coup if he wanted to.

‘Well, I
assumed
it was you,’ Jean-Paul said, milking the moment a little longer. ‘Sylvie said she had a lover, and he was in
glass
. I didn’t know what a lover in
glass
was. So she told me. She said the family
made
glass. I asked if it was you – I remembered something about the glass.’

‘Was there anyone else? Any other lover?’

‘Should there be?’ he asked with a spark of sarcasm, and I realised that while Jean-Paul might be tolerant of his sister’s hash smoking, he wasn’t quite so relaxed about her love life.

I looked away through misty windows to threadbare trees and spotting rain. ‘Did she say anything else about me?’ I asked, not quite sure why I wanted to know.

‘No,’ he said dismissively. Then, tiring of his own animosity, he gave the question some consideration. ‘She said you had a boat. She said she was going on it. What else?’ He blew out his lips. ‘It was a long time ago. I really don’t remember.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, April, I suppose. Early May. Thereabouts. Oh yeah,’ he said as something else came back to him, ‘she talked about some trip you were going to make.’

‘To France?’

He frowned at me. ‘Maybe. I can’t remember.’ For no obvious reason he became cross again. He straightened up and folded his arms meaningfully; the interview was over.

‘Well, thanks for your help,’ I said. ‘If you could speak to Joe?’

He made a gesture that was intentionally ambiguous.

‘Perhaps I could call you in a day or so?’

‘No thanks,’ he said bluntly.

‘I meant—’

‘If Joe feels like making contact, I’ll get him to call you direct.’

At the door I said, ‘A while ago my brother told me you wanted to see me.’

‘That was then.’

‘I just wondered . . .’

‘I had very little to say to you then,’ he declared with a rancour that was all the stronger for having been temporarily forgotten, ‘and I’ve got even less to say to you now.’

The door closed sharply behind me and reaching the ground floor I heard the muffled clamour of strident orchestral music drifting down the stairs after me. As Jean-Paul’s last remarks reverberated caustically in my mind, I had the feeling I would not be hearing from Joe.

‘I’m glad you were able to come,’ Jones smiled, gesturing vaguely towards a chair. He began to search for some errant object, patting his outer pockets several times before swinging open a jacket front and starting on the inner realms, only to return once again to the outer pockets, dipping his hands into the same slots time and again like some bemused rap dancer. He spread a palm and smiled in benign defeat, ‘My glasses . . .’

He was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere in his fifties or sixties, short and balding. I couldn’t work out if this absentmindedness was genuine or part of some stratagem for putting patients at their ease.

With an exclamation of victory, Jones scooped up his glasses from under some papers and, settling himself behind his desk, cast me a diffident smile.

‘I hope it wasn’t inconvenient,’ he said with a strong Welsh lilt, ‘but I felt a chat would be useful.’ He had called me late the previous evening after Ginny’s visit, to ask if I might be able to come and ‘discuss a few things’, a request which had sent profound and irrational fears shivering through my heart.

‘You worried me,’ I told him now. ‘You made it sound serious.’

‘Did I? Well, I don’t think it’s anything to be too concerned about,’ he said with a caution that managed to convey precisely the opposite impression. ‘I just felt there were certain problems which you should be aware of.’

‘I know she’s not taking all her drugs.’

‘Ah.’ His eyebrows flew up.

‘She didn’t tell you?’

‘No,’ he said with the lack of surprise of a doctor who is used to his patients following their own ideas about what is good for them.

‘She’s still taking the tranquilliser, I think, but not the Prozac. She said it made her feel worse.’

‘I’ll have a word with her next time,’ he said, making a quick note. ‘See if I can find her something that suits her better.’ There was a pause in which he gathered himself to tell me what was on his mind. ‘Yes, the thing is . . . We had a useful session yesterday, Virginia and I. On the face of it she seems to be coping. She doesn’t appear to be too overwhelmed by her situation. She seems to be able to contemplate the future – even the idea of prison – with some degree of composure. But at the same time I’m not absolutely sure that her view of the future, or indeed of the past, is based on reality. I’m not sure she’s able to determine what is real and what is not, or to separate what is true from what she would like to be true. Sometimes people evade the truth as a way of managing their fears – evade it, but deep down never lose sight of it. In Virginia’s case, however, I think she
has
lost sight of reality. I think fact and fantasy have become profoundly muddled in her mind.’