Suspect (18 page)

“Do you know why Catherine came down to London?” I ask.

“According to her flatmate she had a job interview. We found no correspondence— she probably had it with her.”

“What about phone records?”

“Nothing from her home number. She had a mobile, but that’s missing.”

He delivers the facts without comment or embel ishment. Catherine’s history matches with the scant details she gave to me during our sessions. Her parents had divorced when she was twelve. She hooked up with a bad crowd, sniffing aerosols and doing drugs. At fifteen she spent six weeks in a private psychiatric hospital in West Sussex. Her family kept it quiet for obvious reasons.

Becoming a nurse had seemed to be the turning point. Although she stil had problems, she managed to cope.

“What happened after she left the Marsden?” I ask.

“She moved back to Liverpool and got engaged to a merchant seaman. It didn’t work out.”

“Is he a suspect?”

“No. He’s in Bahrain.”

“Any other suspects?”

Ruiz smiles wryly. “Al volunteers are welcome.” Finishing his drink, he gets to his feet. “I have to go.”

“What happens next?”

“I get my people digging up everything they can on this Bobby Moran. If I can link him to Catherine I’l ask him very politely to help me with my inquiries.”

“And you won’t mention my name?”

He looks at me contemptuously. “Don’t worry, Professor, your interests are paramount in my concerns.”

17

My mother has a pretty face with a neat upturned nose and straight hair that she has worn in the same uniform style— pinned back with silver clips and tucked behind her ears— for as long as I can remember. Sadly, I inherited my father’s tangle of hair. If it grows half an inch too long it becomes completely unruly and I look like I’ve been electrocuted.

Everything about my mother denotes her standing as a doctor’s wife, right down to her box-pleated skirts, unpatterned blouses and low-heeled shoes. A creature of habit, she even carries a handbag when taking the dog for a walk.

She can arrange a dinner party for twelve in the time it takes to boil an egg. She also does garden parties, school fetes, church jamborees, charity fund-raisers, bridge tournaments, rummage sales, walkathons, christenings, weddings and funerals. Yet for al this ability, she has managed to get through life without balancing a checkbook, making an investment decision or proffering a political opinion in public. She leaves such matters to my father.

Every time I contemplate my mother’s life I am appal ed by the waste and unfulfil ed promise. At eighteen she won a mathematics scholarship to Cardiff University. At twenty-five she wrote a thesis that had American universities hammering at her door. What did she do? She married my father and settled for a life of cultivating convention and making endless compromises.

I like to imagine her doing a Shirley Valentine and running off with a Greek waiter, or writing a steamy romantic novel. One day she is going to suddenly toss aside her prudence, self-discipline and correctness. She wil go dancing barefoot in daisy fields and trekking through the Himalayas. These are nice thoughts. They’re certainly better than imagining her growing old listening to my father rant at the TV screen or read aloud the letters he’s written to newspapers.

That’s what he’s doing now— writing a letter. He only reads
The Guardian
when he stays with us, but “that red rag” as he refers to it, gives him enough material for at least a dozen letters.

My mother is in the kitchen with Julianne discussing tomorrow’s menu. At some stage in the previous twenty-four hours it was decided to make Sunday lunch a family get-together. Two of my sisters are coming, with their husbands and solemn children. Only Rebecca wil escape. She’s in Bosnia working for the UN. Bless her.

My Saturday morning chores now involve moving a ton of plumbing equipment from the front hal way into the basement. Then I have to rake the leaves, oil the swing and get two more bags of coal from the local garage. Julianne is going to shop for the food, while Charlie and her grandparents go to look at the Christmas lights in Oxford Street.

My other chore is to buy a tree— a thankless task. The only truly wel -proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try to find one in real life you face inevitable disappointment. Your tree wil lean to the left or the right. It wil be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. It wil have bald patches, or the branches on either side wil be oddly spaced. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, it won’t fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the roof rack and drive home the branches are broken or twisted out of shape. You wrestle it through the door, gagging on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question that resonates down from countless Christmases past:

“Is that real y the best one you could find?”

Charlie’s cheeks are pink with the cold and her arms are draped in polished paper bags ful of new clothes and a pair of shoes.

“I got heels, Dad. Heels!”

“How high?”

“Only this much.” She holds her thumb and forefinger apart.

“I thought you were a tomboy,” I tease.

“They’re not pink,” she says sternly. “And I didn’t get any dresses.”

God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting is pouring himself a scotch and getting annoyed because my mother is chatting with Julianne instead of bringing him some ice. Charlie is excitedly opening bags.

Then she suddenly stops. “The tree! It’s lovely.”

“So it should be. It took me three hours to find.”

I have to stop myself tel ing her the whole story about my friend from the Greek deli in Chalk Farm Road, who told me about a guy who supplies trees to “half of London” from the back of a three-ton truck.

The whole enterprise sounded pretty dodgy, but for once I didn’t care. I wanted to get a flawless specimen and that’s what it is— a pyramid of pine-scented perfection, with a straight trunk and perfectly spaced branches.

Since getting home I have been wandering back and forth to the sitting room, marveling at the tree. Julianne is getting slightly fed up with me saying “Isn’t that a great tree?” and expecting a response.

God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting is tel ing me his solution to traffic congestion in central London. I’m waiting for him to comment on the tree. I don’t want to prompt him. He’s talking about banning al delivery trucks in the West End except for designated hours. Then he starts complaining about shoppers who walk too slowly and suggests a fast- and slow-lane system.

“I found a tree today,” I interject, unable to wait. He stops abruptly and looks over his shoulder. He stands and examines it more closely, walking from side to side. Then he stands back to best appreciate the overal symmetry.

Clearing his throat, he asks, “Is it the best one they had?”

“No! They had dozens of better ones! Hundreds! This was one of the worst; the absolute pits; the bottom of the barrel. I felt sorry for it. That’s why I brought it home. I adopted a lousy Christmas tree.”

He looks surprised. “It isn’t
that
bad.”

“You’re fucking unbelievable,” I mutter under my breath, unable to stay in the same room. Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt?

I retreat to the kitchen and pour myself a drink. My father has only been here for ten hours and already I’m hitting the bottle. At least reinforcements arrive tomorrow.

I was always running in my childhood nightmares— trying to escape a monster or a rabid dog or perhaps a Neanderthal second-rower forward with no front teeth and cauliflower ears. I would wake just before getting caught. It didn’t make me feel any safer. That is the problem with nightmares. Nothing is resolved. We rouse ourselves in midair or just before the bomb goes off or stark naked in a public place.

I have been lying in the dark for five hours. Every time I think nice thoughts and begin drifting off to sleep, I jump awake in a panic. It’s like watching a trashy horror movie that is laughably bad, but just occasional y there is a scene that frightens the bejesus out of you.

Mostly I’m trying not to think about Bobby Moran because when I think about him it leads me to Catherine McBride and that’s a place I don’t want to go. I wonder if Bobby is in custody, or if they’re watching him. I have this picture in my head of a van with blacked-out windows parked outside his place.

People can’t real y sense when they’re being watched— not without some clue or recognizing something untoward. However, Bobby doesn’t operate on the same wave length as most people. He picks up different signals. A psychotic can believe the TV is talking to him and wil question why workmen are repairing phone lines over the road, or why there’s a van with blacked-out windows parked outside.

Maybe none of this is happening. With al the new technology, perhaps Ruiz can find everything he needs by simply typing Bobby’s name into a computer and accessing the private files that every conspiracy theorist is convinced the government keeps on the nation’s citizens.

“Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep,” Julianne whispers. She can sense when I’m worried about something. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Charlie was born. You get out of the habit after a while. Now I have these pil s, which are making things worse.

Julianne is lying on her side, with the sheet tucked between her thighs and one hand resting on the pil ow next to her face. Charlie does the same thing when she’s sleeping. They barely make a sound or stir at al . It’s as though they don’t want to leave a footprint in their dreams.

By midmorning the house is ful of cooking smel s and feminine chatter. I’m expected to set the fire and sweep the front steps. Instead, I sneak around to the newsstands and col ect the morning papers.

Back in my study, I set aside the supplements and magazines and begin looking for stories on Catherine. I’m just about to sit down when I notice one of Charlie’s bug-eyed goldfish is floating upside down in the aquarium. For a moment I think it might be some sort of neat goldfish trick, but on closer inspection it doesn’t look too hale and hearty. It has gray speckles on its scales— evidence of an exotic fish fungus.

Charlie doesn’t take death very wel . Middle Eastern kingdoms have shorter periods of mourning. Scooping up the fish in my hand, I stare at the poor creature. I wonder if she’l believe it just disappeared. She
is
only eight. Then again, she doesn’t believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny anymore. How could I have bred such a cynic?

“Charlie, I have some bad news. One of your goldfish has disappeared.”

“How could it just disappear?”

“Wel , actual y it died. I’m sorry.”

“Where is it?”

“You don’t real y want to see it, do you?”

“Yes.”

The fish is stil in my hand, which is in my pocket. When I open my palm it seems more like a magic trick than a solemn deed.

“At least you didn’t try to buy me a new one,” she says.

Being very organized, Julianne has a whole col ection of shoe boxes and drawstring bags that she keeps for this sort of death in the family. With Charlie looking on, I bury the bug-eyed goldfish under the plum tree, between the late Harold Hamster, a mouse known only as Mouse and a baby sparrow that flew into the French doors and broke its neck.

By one o’clock most of the family has assembled, except for my older sister, Lucy, and her husband, Eric, who have three children whose names I can never remember, but I know they end with an “ee” sound like Debbie, Jimmy or Bobby.

God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting had wanted Lucy to name her oldest boy after him. He liked the idea of a third generation Joseph. Lucy held firm and cal ed him something else—

Andy maybe, or Gary, or Freddy.

They’re always late. Eric is an air-traffic control er and the most absentminded person I have ever met. It’s frightening. He keeps forgetting where we live and has to phone up and ask for directions every time he visits. How on earth does he keep dozens of planes apart in the air? Whenever I book a flight out of Heathrow I feel like ringing up Lucy in advance and asking whether Eric is working.

My middle sister, Patricia, is in the kitchen with her new man, Simon, a criminal lawyer who works for one of those TV series that exposes miscarriages of justice. Patricia’s divorce has come through and she’s celebrating with champagne.

“I hardly think it warrants Bol inger,” says my father.

“Why ever not?” she says, taking a quick slurp before it bubbles over.

I decide to rescue Simon. Nobody deserves this sort of introduction to our family. We take our drinks into the sitting room and make smal talk. Simon has a jol y round face and keeps slapping his stomach like a department store Santa. “Sorry to hear about the old Parkinson’s,” he says. “Terrible business.” My heart sinks. “Who told you?”

“Patricia.”

“How did she know?”

Suddenly realizing his mistake, Simon starts apologizing. There have been some depressing moments in the past month, but none quite so depressing as standing in front of a complete stranger, who is drinking my scotch and feeling sorry for me.