Dying for Christmas (36 page)

When Katy woke up in the morning and found her mother in the house she was so excited Kim felt her heart breaking all over again.

Now, back in the office, she feels like something that has been dug up. Something less than human.

‘Kim. Come with me, please.’

Robertson has come bursting out of his glass-walled office, shrugging on his jacket, and is already waiting for her by the door. Kim has a brief glimpse of Martin’s hurt expression before she rushes to join him.

‘Where are we going, sir?’

‘Savile Row,’ says Robertson, naming a police station in the West End. ‘Natalie Lacey has reappeared.’

* * *

I’ve hardly slept – and when I did I dreamed of that baby I never had except it wasn’t my baby, it was poor little smothered Sam with a blue face just like Bella’s. ‘It’s not my fault,’ I kept saying. ‘I didn’t kill him. It’s not my fault.’ Except I knew it was.

At some point in the night, I tried Natalie’s phone again and instead of ringing, it went dead as if it had been cut off. Travis still hasn’t come home. Sometimes it happens that the hospital is short-staffed and he has to cover for someone at the last minute, so he’ll grab a few hours’ sleep in one of the overnight rooms before starting another shift, but he usually calls. I wonder what the chances are that he hasn’t yet heard about Dominic Lacey’s death and decide they’re quite low. Hospitals are renowned for being insular places where news from the outside world rarely penetrates, but in this case Lacey was in the same building. Word would have spread. I’m sure of it. Besides, by now half the world’s media must be camped outside the main doors.

I’m back on the sofa, watching the television. The news is showing the same clips over and over. Me walking out of the hospital on the day I was released. Photos of Dominic and of Natalie and of the apartment in Wapping. When they start showing footage from the balcony of the flat below his with the view of the river and the Shard in the distance, I feel sick and change the channel fast.

* * *

Sometimes when you meet people in the flesh after only having seen them in photographs, it’s hard to recognize them, but in Natalie Lacey’s case it’s like the two-dimensional image on the page has burst into life. Everything from her blonde-streaked hair to her startling green eyes is just as Kim would have expected from pictures she’s seen, and from the painting on Lacey’s wall. Only her nose seems different. Smaller somehow.

‘I was terrified of my husband,’ she is telling the two detectives in the interview room with her. Kim and Robertson are watching from a neighbouring room, through a two-way mirror. ‘As soon as I heard he was dead, it was like a massive weight lifting off me. Finally I can pick up my life again.’

Natalie has already talked them through what life was like married to Dominic Lacey. She has shown them scars on her wrists and legs, and was about to take her top off to show the ones on her back, but the detectives told her it wasn’t necessary.

‘What do you make of her?’

Kim tries to analyse her own reactions before replying to her superior’s question. ‘Well, on one hand I can’t help feeling this is all a bit of a show. She’s like an actress, don’t you think, sir? Have you noticed how she keeps looking up here? She knows she’s being observed and she’s playing to it.’

‘And on the other?’

‘I would say she seems genuinely to have been afraid of her husband. Her voice changes when she talks about him, it gets smaller and kind of harder.’

Robertson nods, not giving much away. ‘She didn’t waste much time before making her reappearance,’ he says.

‘Well, I guess she’s been waiting for the chance to step back into her old life, and now that he’s gone …’

The Super nods and turns back to the window. ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ he says. ‘Nevertheless, I think it’s worth checking whether Dominic Lacey left a will. Nothing like an inheritance for bringing grieving widows back to life.’

Chapter Forty-Seven

When Kim says it the first time, I think I’ve misheard. I ask her to repeat it.

‘Natalie Lacey turned up in a central-London police station early this morning. She isn’t dead.’

The room starts spinning and I have to close my eyes until it stops.

I say how wonderful I think the news is.

‘Of course, now there’s no possibility that Dominic Lacey murdered his wife, or in fact anyone, it slightly changes the complexion of the case,’ Kim goes on.

After I come off the phone, I am hit by a wave of panic as I work out what she means. Now there’s no evidence of a pattern of murder, now that murder isn’t part of his MO – I think that’s the right term – it’s even more of a mystery why he kidnapped me, intending to kill me. It doesn’t fit his pattern.

I pick up my phone to try Travis’ number but get put through to his voicemail. I leave yet another message to add to all the others.

Now Natalie has come out, I am totally alone and I can’t bear it. Turning the television back on, I flick through the channels restlessly, trying to calm my racing thoughts. I pause on a soap opera, my eye caught by something in the scene. At first I can’t work out what it is that attracted my attention but then I realize it’s the curtains. They’re made from the same fabric as the cushions in Travis’ parents’ living room.

And now I’m running for the bathroom, feeling the bile rising up into my mouth.

That’s why I recognized the cushion when I was Skyping Natalie.

Her safe house is Travis’ parents’ home.

* * *

Since this morning’s visit to Savile Row, adrenalin has replaced tiredness and Kim’s mind is jumping around from place to place like a flea on a dog’s coat. Martin was sniffy when she returned, and didn’t seem to think there was much to be read into the timing of Natalie Lacey’s reappearance.

‘Why wouldn’t she come back now? She was petrified of her husband and now he’s dead. Simples.’

It is simples, as Martin says, and yet there’s something else buzzing at the edges of Kim’s consciousness that she can’t quite crystallize into thought.

At lunchtime she calls home and speaks to Rory. His voice sounds small and tearful and when she asks to speak to Sean he says Dad was called into work so Teri is there. The babysitter comes to the phone and assures her she doesn’t mind at all and tells her how brave Rory is being.

Kim hangs up and puts her head in her hands. It’s still there when Robertson calls her and Martin in to his office.

‘There’s been a development,’ he says.

‘Don’t tell me, Cesca Dunbar has just strolled into a police station.’ Kim suspects Martin is attempting to be funny to show he’s not bothered about being left out of this morning’s trip to Savile Row.

‘I had a call an hour ago from the medical examiner. Unofficially, preliminary investigations indicate Dominic Lacey didn’t die of his existing injuries. Signs are he died of an overdose of insulin. I checked with the hospital, and they’ve just come back to me to say they believe his saline drip was tampered with.

‘It’s very likely Dominic Lacey was murdered.’

* * *

When Travis lets himself into the flat, I’m so taken aback that there’s a delay before I recognize him. Already in my mind he’s gone from boyfriend to stranger and his sudden presence in the living room feels like a shocking intrusion.

He drops his keys on the table without speaking and sinks down into the lumpy-cushioned armchair.

Taking off his glasses, he rubs the lenses with the hem of his T-shirt. His eyes are red-ringed, the whites threaded through with tiny pink veins, and there’s at least two days’ growth on his top lip and chin. I am reminded suddenly of the time he tried to grow a goatee, and his outrage when he saw his beard was coming through ginger.

He replaces his glasses and then at last he speaks. ‘I could say I’m sorry, but what would be the point?’

If passive-aggressive hadn’t already existed, Travis would have just invented it.

‘She’s just using you,’ I point out. ‘Women like Natalie Lacey don’t go for speccy junior doctors.’

He shrugs, not bothering to argue.

‘How long has it been going on?’

He glances at me with his pink lab-mice eyes and then looks away again.

‘Come on. I deserve to know that at least. Did she contact you during those twelve days that I was away? Before?’

It’s that one point in the day where the sun is at the right angle to penetrate our living room, and a shimmer of dust hovers in the patch of pale light in between us.

‘
When
, Travis?’

I need to hear I’m wrong. I need to hear that despite all the other parts of my life that have turned out to be lies, this one truth at least remains.

‘I met her in November.’

I relax. This I can cope with.

‘November the year before last.’

There’s a sickening lurch as the world shifts from one reality to another. November the year before last was one month before Dominic Lacey came up to me in the department-store café, before our first encounter in the Luton airport hotel.

And now I understand.

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t random. Dominic Lacey targeted me because of Travis.

Rage is a lump in my throat too big to swallow.

‘It was a one-night stand.’ Travis isn’t looking at me. ‘I’d treated her at A&E a couple of times before, injuries she said she’d sustained kickboxing. Of course I knew what was really going on. We’re trained to look for that sort of thing. What can I say? She just got to me.’

‘So a victim of domestic abuse comes to you for help and you shag her? Classy.’

‘The next day I felt awful. As a doctor it was unforgivable.’

‘And as a boyfriend? What about that?’ My voice has risen until it is a shrill note reverberating in the air.

Travis shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Don’t play the moral-outrage card, Jessica. Not after you did exactly the same thing a month later.’

He means by sleeping with Dominic. I open my mouth to tell him how it is different. Then close it again.

‘After that I didn’t hear from her again for months. I felt guilty. I tried to make it up to you. Of course I didn’t realize you had guilty secrets of your own.’

Now it’s my turn to look away.

‘Then last September, out of the blue, she called me up. She said she’d left him. She said she wanted to see me. I was flattered. You’d been acting so distant and so weird with those episodes where you blanked out and couldn’t remember anything, or came home with bruises you couldn’t explain. Course I didn’t know then you were just covering up for your little bondage sessions.’

I ignore the childish barb. September. That would be when Natalie was holed up in Edinburgh, going stir-crazy with boredom. I can just imagine her scrolling through her list of past conquests wondering who to contact next.

‘You’re not the Saudi playboy by any chance, are you?’ I ask him.

He gives me a blank look. ‘I travelled up to Scotland overnight to meet her.’

‘That would be when you told me you were on secondment to the teaching hospital in Newcastle?’

He nods. ‘I fell in love with her.’

I’m amazed how much it hurts, hearing him say it.

‘I told her she could stay at my parents’ house while they were away in Florida. I wanted to protect her.’

The idea of Natalie needing protecting is laughable.

‘I became obsessed with her. I went to see her whenever I could get away.’

‘So why didn’t you just leave me?’

Travis shrugs. ‘Because you seemed so lost. Because I wasn’t completely sure that this thing with Natalie would ever amount to anything. Because I was weak.’

‘Because you’re a knob.’

He raises a tight smile. ‘That too.’

The silence that follows reverberates with what Travis didn’t say.
Because I love you
.

‘So when did you realize there was a connection to me?’

‘I was jealous, convinced she was seeing other men behind my back. Whatever you think, I’m not a complete idiot. I know she’s out of my league and it made me paranoid. We hardly saw each other and then when we were together she’d go off to make phone calls or send texts. We had a huge row about it one night and I grabbed hold of her phone and went to her call list to find the last number she’d called. And it was yours.’

I allow myself a smile at this. It is funny, after all.

‘So she had no idea either, that you and I were together?’

‘No. She thought you were just some woman he’d randomly picked up. Of course, once she realized you were my girlfriend, she guessed immediately that he’d deliberately targeted you in a tit-for-tat act of revenge. She said that’s exactly how his mind would work. Natalie reckoned that’s partly what this Christmas lock-in thing was about – he liked the idea you’d be with him instead of me. He’d probably present me with some sort of souvenir video afterwards, she thought.’

Now something else is occurring to me. ‘Did you know the whole time that I was planning to spend Christmas with him? And you didn’t try to stop me?’

He shakes his head. ‘Don’t be stupid. I’d never have let you go through with it.’

‘Not even to help the new love of your life?’

Sarcasm drips off my tongue but Travis doesn’t rise to it.

‘I rang her the night you disappeared to find out if she knew what was going on, and she told me then what you’d planned. I was absolutely livid. I tried to force her to tell me the address – I’d treated her in the hospital, don’t forget. I knew what that animal was capable of. But then she told me about Grace being in danger and convinced me that Lacey wasn’t going to hurt you – not unless he felt under attack. She told me if I told anyone, she’d disappear and I’d never see her, or probably you, again. She never told me where he’d taken you – or that anyone was going to get killed.’