Dying for Christmas (25 page)

Natalie had been so pleased with herself about that one – her assiduous harvesting of her own DNA. Prior to going into the clinic to have her boobs done, she’d already had a couple of other clandestine procedures – two of her ribs removed to cinch in her waist, liposuction to suck out excess fat. And during her most recent stay, it wasn’t just her boobs she’d had done, but her nose too – a small bump removed to give her a startling new profile. Amazing how much of a human body you can take away and still be able to walk and talk and breathe. I don’t know who she bribed to keep hold of all the bits. Maybe she didn’t need to. One of my old bosses who had a six-month stay in a cancer ward used to collect cysts in a jar. The porters used to sneak them to him. People are weird like that. Just look at Dominic and his baby teeth.

The presents. Another of Natalie’s brainwaves. The stories behind them are all true – they’re the beads that, threaded together, make up Dominic’s twisted life. He related them to Natalie over the course of their marriage, showed her the mementos. That’s when it started to sink in that she’d married a madman. The candle she made herself with instructions off the internet. And she sent off to somewhere in America for the engraving for the urn. Utah, I think. She thought engravers in Utah were unlikely to read the English papers.

I try to remember this as I lie in bed in my parents’ spare room with the spherical white paper lampshade, staring at the three vases on the chest of drawers bearing the last of the flowers we brought home from the hospital. It’s all true. All the things he did during his life or had done to him. All the things I wrote. And though he didn’t kidnap me or force me to do the things we did, neither would I say it was exactly consensual. So that bit is sort of true as well, when you look at it like that.

You’d have to be some kind of sick fuck, as Natalie says, to make it up.

Chapter Thirty-One

‘How did someone like you get mixed up with someone like him?’

That’s what Natalie asked me the first time we met. I don’t think ‘someone like you’ was intended to be flattering, but even so, she had a point. People like me don’t know people like Dominic Lacey.

The funny thing is, we did meet in a department-store café more or less as I wrote in my account. Not exactly on Christmas Eve but thereabouts. And not the Christmas just gone but the one before. I had a lot of shopping. He came and sat down. We got talking. I was flattered. Travis and I weren’t getting on. He was distant and cold, and had been hanging out with the medics from the hospital instead of coming home. I’d had the abortion a few weeks before and Travis had taken two days off but on the second day he’d asked if I minded if he went in after all. There was something important he had to do. More important than me. He went back to his parents’ that Christmas for once – they’d cut short their usual five-month sojourn in Florida on account of his dad’s prostate operation – and I really thought it might be over. I wanted out of my life for a bit.

I didn’t just take the bait, I bit the hand that hooked it on.

Dominic drove me from Oxford Street to a hotel near Luton airport. I was so embarrassed I stayed in the car till he got the room key and then slipped into the lift when no one was about. I felt people would be able to tell what I was about to do just by looking at me.

He didn’t get out his box of tricks, not that night, but there were things I did, things he somehow got me to do, that when I thought about them afterwards, I couldn’t believe it had been me. Later, I found it helped to think of the woman in that bed as someone separate, not me at all. It meant that when I went back to my normal life I could put that night in a box, bringing it out only rarely when I was alone, handling it gingerly like a dangerous animal.

If he’d just left it at that, how differently would things have turned out? I’d never have met Natalie. This last nightmarish year would never have happened. Dominic wouldn’t be in a coma in intensive care. I wouldn’t be the Christmas Kidnap Miracle Girl. I would still have a passport.

I want it all to go away. I want to go back to how it was. If I just find the right combination in my mind, surely I can unlock the door in time and space that’ll lead me back to the life I had before.

I lie on the spare-room bed and look up at the paper lightshade and spot a smattering of dust on the top that has escaped my father’s notice. Since he retired, my father likes to go around the house with the hoover brush attachment, reaching up to top shelves and high corners. I suspect it makes him feel in control.

I lean back against the pillows and try to think myself backwards in time.

* * *

She is wearing out Heather’s patience. Kim can tell. When Heather first invited her to stay for as long as she needed, she probably imagined nights sitting up far too late while Kim bared her soul over a bottle of wine, like they used to do when they shared a flat as twenty-somethings, and Sunday-afternoon trips to the cinema, maybe the odd dinner party even. Instead she has a flatmate who, on the rare occasions she isn’t at work or visiting her kids, is too depressed to speak. They bump into each other when Kim is in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, or dashing to the bathroom, hugging her towel to her chest, eager for the oblivion of a hot bath. And Heather puts her head to one side and makes that face people make when they want to commiserate but don’t know what to say, or she says, ‘How are you bearing up?’ And Kim says, ‘Oh, you know.’ Not because Kim doesn’t want to talk but because there’s a great big boulder lodged in her throat that makes it impossible for the words to come out. And she worries that if that boulder ever moved, there’d be such a tsunami of words and feelings, they’d never ever stop.

She goes home to see the kids every day – tense occasions where she paints on a layer of jollity like varnish before she steps inside – but it doesn’t stop the constant ache she feels whenever she thinks about them.

Yet still work consumes her. She knows she is over-involved in this Jessica Gold investigation. There is something about the younger woman that is weirdly familiar – a stubborn streak of ‘otherness’ that reminds her of herself as she was before marriage and motherhood homogenized her into someone else. It’s no longer just a case, it’s the case that will decide the next stage of her career, and the case that might cost her her family.

At night she revisits it in her dreams.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The solicitor has a pouched face with pockets of sallow, sagging flesh and brown eyes which look to have seen altogether too much. My dad introduces us in a café near the police station and there’s a surreal ten minutes while they reminisce about someone called Tucker who once fell asleep on the last bus home and spent the night locked up in a bus garage. The solicitor, whose name is David Gallant (‘by name if not by nature,’ says my dad, with a poor attempt at a joke), thinks Tucker spent a couple of years in Australia but then came back and went to work for the Civil Service. ‘Good pension then, lucky sod,’ says my dad. Only now do they feel that sufficient preliminaries have been exchanged to broach the subject that brings them both here. The subject that is sipping a tasteless white coffee while her nerves prick and fizzle like a short-circuited plug. Me.

David talks me through what will happen at the police station. He checks I’ve brought my passport and when he tells me I’ll be interviewed under caution, I say ‘Oh’ so loudly the couple on the next table turn round to look. ‘It’s just procedure,’ he assures me. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ My father presses my leg under the table, but doesn’t speak, and when we leave him there a few minutes later I have a horrible feeling he’s about to cry.

In the waiting area at the police station there’s a man playing a drum. He has three children with him. David starts to explain about saying ‘No comment’ but it’s impossible to concentrate on what he’s saying over the noise of the drum. ‘Please,’ he says eventually, turning to the man. ‘We’re trying to have a conversation here.’

‘Sorry, bro.’ The man doesn’t stop drumming, but he does indeed look sorry. ‘This here is a peaceful protest. My nephew, these kids’ brother, is being abused in foster care, but no one is doing nothing about it, so this is the only power I have to try to make them take notice. I been here all day, and yesterday and the day before, and I’m going to be here every day until they listen to me.’

David glances over at the duty officer behind the glass at the reception counter, who raises his eyebrows in a ‘What can you do?’ gesture.

I lock eyes with the girl sitting to the man’s left. She is about eleven or twelve. Her hair is set in masses of braids, each knotted at the end with a different coloured bead, and she has a resigned expression on her face as if she’s heard all this before. As she gazes at me impassively, I hear a woman singing a pop song that was a mega-hit for a boy band a couple of years ago, but she’s slowed it right down like a sad lullaby. She is singing so close to my ear that my eardrum vibrates, but I don’t turn around because I know she’s not there, and when the little girl looks away, the singing stops and only the sadness remains.

A new policeman comes out to fetch us. He’s wearing a dark jacket with a shiny, greasy strip at the back of the neck and pointy shoes that click along the corridor. We follow him into an interview room with a blue carpet, a laminated table, four chairs and a CCTV camera on the wall that I try to ignore. I’m both relieved and disappointed that there’s no sign of a two-way mirror. A few minutes later, the older police guy, who introduces himself again as DSI Robertson, comes in and explains that the interview will be taped. I swallow hard and try not to think of the implications. It was one thing writing those lies down in the sketchbook account when I could still kid myself no one would read them. Even that ‘chat’ in the hospital could have been explained away as the result of trauma and heavy medication. But this is different. There is no going back from this.

‘Do you understand, Jessica?’ DSI Robertson asks me after he finishes reading me my rights. I nod, but the truth is I don’t understand. None of it. I don’t understand how I ended up here, or how my life went so badly wrong. I don’t understand how they can’t see I don’t belong here.

They each have a transcript of the sketchbook account and they ask me questions and I don’t deviate from what I wrote, grateful for all those role-play sessions with Natalie during those long hours in the cottage in Scotland. Only when it gets to the end, to the bits we didn’t plan, does my voice start to falter. They break off the interview to fetch me water in a plastic cup. When I raise it to my lips, my fingers are shaking.

‘My client is still very weak,’ David Gallant says. ‘She’s been through a major trauma and has only just been released from hospital. How long are you intending to keep her here?’

‘We can break off for today, if you like, and resume tomorrow.’ DSI Robertson is a picture of amenability, but the prospect of coming back again is like a tight band around my chest and I shake my head.

Somehow we get through to the end, though I play up my physical weakness, putting my hand to my forehead often as if massaging an aching head or blinking when asked a question as if trying to unscramble the words in my mind. After it’s over, and they’ve shown me the typed statement and I’ve signed it in writing so spidery it looks more like an illustration than a signature, I am released on police bail. Even though David warned me this could be the outcome, I’m still shocked by it, and experience an acute sense of loss when I hand over my passport.

‘It’s just a formality,’ David shouts over the top of the drumming as we make our way back out through the waiting room. ‘It’s security while they carry out their investigations and wait to see if the CPS decides to charge you with anything.’ He catches sight of my face. ‘Don’t worry. In view of the circumstances, I’m sure they’ll be lenient.’

But still I make him tell me the worst-case scenarios. As my dad comes rushing over to meet us at the bottom of the station steps, his features twisted into a question mark, I repeat the possible charges to myself in my head like a chant:
Attempted Murder, Actual Bodily Harm, Unlawful Wounding, Grievous Bodily Harm
.

Walking to the car, I watch the faces of the people we pass and it’s as if they’re separated from me by a wall of glass, as if I’m already in the dock waiting to be sentenced.

* * *

‘I did wonder a few times whether she was all there.’

Lennie Fraser taps the side of his head meaningfully. He is describing the interview he’s just carried out with Jessica Gold, and Kim is trying to hide her resentment that Robertson picked him and not her. Still, at least it wasn’t Martin. That really would have grated.

‘Shouldn’t you have terminated the interview? If she was obviously struggling?’

‘Nah. The Guv’ner gave her the chance of coming back again, but she wanted to get it over with. Anyway she had a brief with her.’

‘So she didn’t contradict herself?’

Lennie shakes his head. ‘She was vague on a few things, particularly towards the end, but that’s not surprising given she was being poisoned at the time.’

‘And what did you make of her?’

Lennie shrugs. ‘She’s an odd one, isn’t she? Other-worldly. Nearly passed out when we told her we’d need to take her passport. You can’t quite imagine how she ever came into the same orbit as someone like Lacey.’

Kim doodles a sun in her notebook with a tiny planet circling round it, then she crosses it out and writes herself a reminder to call Jessica later that day. It’s become a pattern now, that daily phone call. She tells Jessica it’s part of her duty of care as an FLO. But really it’s because she’s convinced that, sooner or later, Jessica Gold will crack.