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Authors: Kate Rhodes

BOOK: Crossbones Yard
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‘So that meant he was guilty?’
‘With respect, Dr Quentin, that’s water under the bridge. All I need to know is how closely to watch him when he gets out tomorrow.’
‘So you can blame me if he kills someone else.’
Burns’s small mouth twitched with irritation or amusement.
‘Based on a thirty-minute observation I’d say he’s got learning difficulties, with the mental ability of a seven- or eight-year-old. Possibly he’s clinically depressed, and he’s still grieving for his mother, but no, I don’t think he’s an immediate threat to anyone.’
‘You’re positive about that?’
‘Except to himself, when he realises no one’s going to take care of him.’
‘My heart bleeds.’ Burns took a deep breath then slowly levered himself to his feet.
It was twelve thirty by the time we arrived back at the hospital car park. Burns’s beady eyes observed me as I undid my seat belt.
‘I’ll ask for you again, Dr Quentin.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because you don’t fuck about.’
‘I assume that’s a compliment, Inspector.’
‘It is. We had some bigwig from the Maudsley last year, for ever reeling out jargon, dazzling us with his intelligence.’ His mouth puckered, like he had swallowed something sour.
I watched as Burns’s Mondeo wove through the parked cars nimbly. The man behind the wheel could have been an athlete at the top of his game.
 
I saw three patients that afternoon. One for anger management, an agoraphobic and a girl called Laura with such advanced anorexia that I wanted to admit her immediately, but there were no beds. Six different wards refused to help
before a staff nurse finally buckled and agreed to keep one free the following day. After my last appointment, I checked my email. One hundred and thirty-six messages with red flags, screaming for an answer. I could have stayed there until midnight and still not emptied my inbox.
At seven I changed into my running gear and headed for the best part of the day. Soon I was running down the stairs so fast that it felt like flight, vaulting three steps at a time. When I reached the street the freezing air made me gasp. Commuters traipsed by, hands in their pockets, bracing themselves against the dark. As soon as I got to the river path the stress of the day evaporated. By HMS
Belfast
I was picking up speed, wondering why anyone ever bothered to go on board. The posters gave too much away, revealing the cramped living quarters where sailors slept in bunks as narrow as their bodies, stacked in alcoves like dinner plates. It would take ten seconds in one of those cabins for my claustrophobia to kick in.
I made myself run at intervals, jogging for a hundred metres then sprinting until my lungs burned, passing huge Victorian warehouses converted into expensive restaurants. By the time I reached China Wharf I’d been going for twenty minutes. I stopped by the railings to let my breathing steady. The water was oily and black, lights from the bus boats catching its dirty surface. God knows how many secrets were hidden underneath. I made my way home at a slow trot, enjoying the rush of endorphins – nature’s reward for nearly killing yourself.
There was no sign of my brother Will’s ancient VW camper van when I got home. Usually it was sitting in my parking space on Providence Square. Maybe he’d decided to move on, park his troubles outside someone else’s flat. The security door to the building had been left open as usual. A woman on the second floor worked from home as a reflexologist and her clients never remembered to pull it shut behind them. I took
the stairs to the third floor and let myself in. The red light on my answer-machine blinked at me.
‘I wondered if you’d seen your brother.’ My mother’s voice petered out, but soon regained its emotionless Home Counties calm. ‘I’ll have to ring tomorrow, I’m going to the Phillipses’ for dinner.’
The second and third messages were from Sean.
‘All I can see is you in my bed, wearing red silk stockings,’ he sighed. ‘Call me, Alice, as soon as you get this.’
I deleted the messages then investigated the contents of the fridge. One ciabatta roll, past its sell-by date, a piece of mozzarella and half a family-sized bar of chocolate. I chopped up a few sun-dried tomatoes and smeared a dollop of pesto on the dried-out bread, covered it with slices of cheese and stuck it under the grill.
Curled up on the sofa, I planned my evening. I would turn off my mobile, eat chocolate in the bath, and for once go to sleep alone.
When I woke up my uneaten meal was still on the coffee table, and someone was tapping on the front door. The sound was quiet but insistent, unlikely to go away. When I finally opened the door, Sean was standing there, clutching a bunch of sunflowers and a carrier of takeaway food. He gave me a long kiss, then pushed past me into the kitchen. It was impossible not to fancy him. Tall, blue eyes, clean-cut, and thirty-two years old, exactly my own age. I don’t know why I always resented the jolt of lust I felt whenever I saw him.
‘You were meant to ring me, Alice.’ Sean dumped the flowers on the table.
‘I fancied a night in. What time is it anyway?’
‘Eight thirty.’ He gave a narrow smile. ‘God, you’re hard work. If I didn’t know better I’d think you couldn’t stand me.’
I looked at the sunflowers’ ragged yellow faces. ‘Where on earth grows these in January?’
‘Somewhere an obscene, guilt-inducing number of air miles away.’
‘You villain. Let me have a shower, then I’ll try and be nice to you.’
The hot water put things back in perspective and afterwards I felt almost human again. When I slipped out of my bathrobe Sean was leaning against the doorframe, ogling me.
‘Don’t get dressed on my account.’
I ignored him, pulling on a silk jumper, then wriggling into a pair of jeans.
In the kitchen he unloaded the takeaway.
‘Vietnamese, my favourite.’ I rubbed my hands together.
‘Clear soup, sticky rice, duck in ginger sauce.’
‘Yum.’
The duck was perfect, with small, fiery chillies that sizzled on my tongue. Sean watched me plough through a mountain of food.
‘How do you stay so tiny, Alice?’
‘Lucky genes.’ I put down my chopsticks and looked at him. ‘What did you get up to today anyway?’
He shrugged. ‘Same old, same old. I cut people up, stitched them together again, listened to Marvin Gaye.’
‘A bit of Motown encourages you to chop people to pieces, does it?’
‘I don’t need encouragement, Dr Quentin.’ He pushed his plate away and grinned at me. ‘You fix sick minds and I cut people up. It’s what we do.’
‘You seem a bit preoccupied, that’s all.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘I am. And it’s a serious problem, actually.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The thing is, I’m on duty soon. I haven’t got long to ravish you.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t need ravishing, thanks all the same.’
‘But that wouldn’t be fair, would it? I’ve raised your hopes.’
He was on his feet, hand in the small of my back steering me into the bedroom. It crossed my mind to say no, and I realise now that I should have done.
‘It’s going to take three seconds to undress you,’ he muttered.
‘It won’t.’ I pulled my jumper over my head. ‘Because I always undress myself.’
The first time was too quick. But the second was slower and more considered. Sean was a natural show-off, and he had done his research, taught himself every fail-safe trick to make a woman come. Afterwards my lips burned; a combination of red-hot chillies and his stubble grazing my face.
‘How long have I been seeing you?’ Sean lay on his side, staring at me.
‘A few weeks.’
‘Longer, Alice. At least three months.’
A ripple of panic stirred under my breastbone. Before long he’d want me to go on holiday with him, or meet his parents.
‘Look, Sean, this is all getting a bit out of control, isn’t it?’
He kissed me again. ‘Absolutely. Deliciously out of control.’
And then he was up, gathering the clothes he’d scattered across the floor. It was impossible not to admire the taut muscles spanning his back as he pulled on his jeans. He slammed the door shut behind him at ten o’clock and I stared at the ceiling. My body felt smug and satisfied, but my thoughts were struggling to get comfortable.
 
At 6 a.m. I sat up in bed, heart racing. Someone was banging on the front door. It crossed my mind that Sean had come back for another helping of low-commitment sex, but only one person would dream of making such a racket at the crack of dawn. My brother was wearing a thin cotton shirt, teeth chattering, pupils so dilated his eyes looked black instead of green.
‘You locked the door,’ he muttered.
‘Come in, Will.’
‘You shouldn’t do that, Alice. Not ever.’
‘It’s okay, sweetheart, come inside.’
‘People will think you don’t like them.’
‘Of course I like you. Come on, you’ll get cold.’
It took ages to coax him into the hall, but I knew better than to touch him. Under the overhead light in the kitchen he looked even worse than he had the week before – unshaven, with hollows under his cheekbones, a deep sore on his upper lip. The muscles in his face kept twitching, his mouth stretched into a rictus like the Joker’s grin in the Batman films. God knows what he’d taken this time; ketamine maybe. Enough to send every nerve ending in his body into overdrive. He ran the tap and dipped his mouth to the stream of water, slurping greedily. I rummaged in the food cupboard. It was almost empty except for a bag of rice and a packet of tortilla chips. I handed him the chips and he tore open the packet, crammed a handful into his mouth.
‘Where are your keys, Will?’
He was too busy eating to reply, so I approached cautiously, dipped my hand into the pocket of his shirt and held them in front of him.
‘Look, they’re here. You could have let yourself in. I’d never lock you out.’
I must have gone too close, or maybe my tone of voice frightened him. He flinched, and then he came at me with both fists, crisps scattering across the floor. I ran out of the kitchen and along the hall, slamming the front door behind me. I got my key into the lock just in time, then leaned against the door to catch my breath. His feet pounded against the small of my back through the wood. I waited for him to exhaust himself, and when the noise finally stopped I ran downstairs to check his van. It was unlocked and a torn sleeping bag was lying on the fold-out bed, newspapers strewn across the slatted floor. Filthy shirts, underwear and towels were piled everywhere. I grabbed the clothes then forced myself to go back.
At the bottom of the stairs I weighed up the risks. There was an outside chance he’d beat me black and blue, but if I
called an ambulance he’d leg it as soon as he heard the siren. I could have knocked on someone’s door and asked for help, but after a few deep breaths I let myself into the flat, legs shaky with adrenalin. Will was in the lounge, chattering peacefully to himself, rummaging in a cupboard. He had already forgotten whatever had triggered his rage. I piled his clothes into the washing machine and poured a liberal amount of detergent into the dispenser. He had found a shoebox full of papers to flick through. I hovered a safe distance away.
‘Found something interesting?’ I took care to make my voice as calm as possible.
‘Pictures,’ he murmured.
He was laying photos on the wooden floor like a game of solitaire. One was of a family holiday. My father’s arms were wrapped tight round my mother and me, and Will was standing outside the circle, already several inches taller than me. Another was of his graduation day at Cambridge; he looked invincible, hair almost white in the sun. He pulled another from the box. This time he was holding hands with one of the dark-haired beauties he went out with. She was gazing at him, determined not to let him go. I bit my lip. Normally it was easier to ignore the gap between then and now.
‘Is there anything you need, Will?’
He was too busy with his new game to reply, so I left him to it and got ready for work. By the time I had taken a shower and put on my make-up, Will had disappeared, leaving the front door hanging wide open. But he had been busy before he left: the lounge floor was covered with rows of photos, as evenly spaced as kitchen tiles. They ran in chronological order, starting with us as babies, a few in school uniform, then the pair of us in our twenties on a beach with Lola, right through to one of him outside the Stock Exchange when he started his job as a trader. He was beaming, as if someone had handed him the
keys to the City. I dropped the picture face down into the box. Part of me wanted to burn the lot, train myself to accept that he would never look like that again – triumphant, like everything he wanted was easily in reach.
 
I cycled to work along Tooley Street. It was startlingly cold, frost glittering on the pavement. For a second I imagined making a getaway, pedalling until my legs failed me, forgetting about the sick people and the worried well, queuing for their appointments. A crowd had already collected outside the London Dungeon, hungry for waxwork murder and artificial gore. At Great Maze Pond I chained my bike to the railings and gazed up at the hospital: a thirty-four-storey shaft of grey concrete studded with minute windows. No wonder Guy’s had won prizes for being London’s ugliest building. If there had been time it would have been easy to calculate which pane of glass belonged to my room, twenty-four floors up, fifth from the left. Climbing the stairs was harder than normal. By the tenth landing my stomach was churning, and I was regretting skipping breakfast. Fourteen flights later my head was spinning, lungs heaving in more oxygen than they could hold.
A steady procession of out-patients filed through my door at forty-five-minute intervals, and the day went by on autopilot. There was one victory though. The girl with advanced anorexia had been safely admitted to Ruskin Ward. I found her hooked to a drip, feeding saline and minerals into her starving body. The chart at the bottom of her bed reminded me that she was Laura Wallis, fifteen years old, five stone and two pounds on admittance. Her mother was perched on an armchair beside her pillow, her face grey under the overhead lights. She looked like she hadn’t slept for days.
‘How’s Laura doing today?’ I asked.
‘I’ve never seen her this bad. She can’t even stay awake.’ The woman’s eyes had the hollow look of trauma victims, as if she was reliving the moments before a bomb exploded. ‘Why’s she doing this to herself?’ she whispered.
I could have reeled off all the clinical factors: depression, body dysmorphia, low self-esteem; but it wouldn’t have helped.
‘Laura’s got a good chance of beating this, believe me.’
Even in sleep the girl’s face looked tense, every bone visible under transparent skin. Her chances of survival were still stacked eighty – twenty in her favour, if she could be persuaded to eat.
‘I’ll see you both tomorrow.’
Mrs Wallis nodded, without taking her eyes off her daughter. Maybe she was afraid the girl would complete her vanishing act if she glanced away.
 
On the way home I stopped at the supermarket on Tower Bridge Road and bought fresh bread, milk, muesli, bananas, Camembert – two carrier bags heaving with food. At least if Will came back tonight the fridge would be full.
I went into the kitchen, dropped a lump of butter into a frying pan, two eggs, three rashers of bacon. I ate them with a huge doorstep of bread, standing in the kitchen, without taking off my coat.
The phone rang just as I finished the last bite.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s your turn to pay me a visit.’ Sean sounded relaxed. He must have finished his shift in the operating theatre then played a game of squash, like he always did.
‘I can’t, sorry. My brother might be coming round.’
‘Fine, I’ll come to you then. I’ll get to meet him at last.’
I glanced around the kitchen. Evidence of Sean’s presence was everywhere. His scarf hanging from the back of
a chair, an overnight bag huddled by the door, containers from last night’s takeaway still stacked by the sink. I took a deep breath.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but I think we should take a break.’
When he finally replied his tone was icy. Another man seemed to have picked up the receiver. ‘What’s your definition of a break?’
‘I mean, we’ve been seeing so much of each other.’
‘Sounds like you’re trying to end it.’ Sean’s voice was rising with anger.
‘I’m sorry. I feel a bit suffocated, that’s all.’
‘Jesus, Alice. We’ve just spent the last three months in bed. You never complained.’
I tried to explain, but he had stopped listening. I held the phone away from my ear while he ranted. Eventually I agreed to meet him the following day to talk.
Afterwards I sat on the settee in the stupor that follows a huge meal or a hard decision. It was half past eight when the moon appeared: a fragile white crescent in the corner of the window, outlined by a fuzz of yellow. For some reason it made me desperate to be outside.
I felt better as soon as my feet hit the pavement. Running is the best form of therapy. It’s impossible to fret or feel guilty when you’re struggling to breathe. I jogged until a rhythm set in, gradually picking up speed. Smokers were loitering outside the Anchor Tavern at Butler’s Wharf, watching a dredger haul itself upstream, like an old man crawling on his hands and knees. I stopped to stretch my hamstrings by the
Golden Hinde
. The replica ship was lit up to please the tourists, dripping with gold paint, new windows gleaming. Francis Drake would have laughed himself sick. By now the endorphins were working their magic, my brain pulsing with a sublime belief that everything could be fixed. I looped back down Marshalsea
Road, and for some reason I turned again at Redcross Way, searching for the river and the quickest way home.

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