Single Obsession

by Des Ekin

  The doorbell rang.

  She jumped. Ever since the break-in, she’d reacted the same way every time the doorbell rang or the phone sounded its shrill summons. Even the milkman, calling to collect his bill, had joked about the panic in her eyes.

  But by now, she had a well-rehearsed security routine. She would switch off the hall lamp, leaving the powerful doorstep light on, and check the caller’s identity through a viewing eye. Even after that, she would have to grapple with a double lock and a reinforced door-chain before opening the door. There was also a panic button on the wall, just a short lunge away.

  Two figures stood on her doorstep. One she recognised immediately as Hunter. The other was a red-faced garda in full uniform. Behind them in the driveway, its lights still on, was a police car with a second officer at the wheel.

  Emma opened the door. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  She had the panicky, illogical thought that they had bad news about Robbie, even though she knew the child was fast asleep in his own bedroom.

  ‘It’s all right, Emma,’ said Hunter. He looked anything but all right, and his haggard appearance was far from reassuring.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ This time she directed her question at the policeman.

  ‘I’ll let Mr Hunter fill you in on the details.’ The policeman obviously wanted to get away as soon as possible. ‘He tells us he’s a patient of yours, ma’am. I just want to make sure.’

  Emma glanced at Hunter. His face remained impassive.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘Yes, Mr Hunter has an appointment. That’s quite all right.’

  Hunter looked relieved.

  ‘Just checking, Doctor. You see, there was a bit of a misunderstanding with another lady earlier. And in view of the burglary at your house …’ He turned away. ‘If there’s any problem, you can call us at the station.’

  The words were directed at her, but obviously intended as a warning to Hunter.

  ‘And we’ll drive past a few times, just in case.’

  Hunter’s face hardened. The policeman was really rubbing it in. ‘There’ll be no problems,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I sincerely hope not, sir. Good night, then.’

  ‘Good night, Officer. Thank you.’ Emma pulled Hunter through the door and slammed it behind them. ‘Hunter, what the hell is going on?’

  Hunter went into the kitchen and sat down heavily.

  ‘Emma,’ he said, ‘I only wish I knew.’

  SHE served out the pasta quills in a store-bought sauce of tomato, roasted garlic, and red pesto, topping the lot with Greek olives, pine nuts and Parmesan. As the aroma drifted around the kitchen, she was surprised at how hungry she was.

  Hunter, who hadn’t eaten since breakfast, was starving. By the time they’d finished the meal, he’d filled her in on the day’s events.

  ‘The police aren’t pressing charges,’ he said, clearing their used plates and putting them in her dishwasher. ‘It was touch and go. In the end, they let me off with a caution, provided I paid for a new door-lock and promised I’d leave Passage North first thing in the morning.’

  ‘But who is this woman who’s masquerading as Mags Jackson?’

  Hunter rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘I’ve no idea, but they’re totally convinced she’s genuine. They’re equally convinced that I’m insane. They kept asking me who my psychiatrist was.’

  ‘And you said me?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sorry. It was the only way I could persuade them to let me go.’

  ‘I hope nobody complains to the Medical Council. That’s all I need right now.’ Emma rose, emptied the percolator of tepid coffee, and put some fresh Java on to brew. ‘None of this makes any sense, Hunter. Even trying to figure it out makes my head hurt.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘You should really give Jill a call,’ she said, busying herself at the sink. ‘Tell her you’re okay.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Jill’s moved out,’ he said. ‘She wants a divorce.’

  She glanced around, saw his expression and sighed. She’d seen the same expression, so many times, on so many men in her clinic.

  ‘Oh, Hunter,’ she said with genuine sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ He threw the knives and forks into the dishwasher with a clatter. ‘It’s been leading up to this for a long time. We should never have got married in the first place, Jill and I.’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It was all wrong. We were both too vulnerable. She had just been chucked over by some rat of a lawyer from New York, and I …’

  He paused, leaving the words unsaid. I had just been chucked over by you.

  ‘And you?’ Emma prompted.

  ‘And I was equally vulnerable after you broke up with me,’ he said.

  She sighed and poured the coffee. ‘I never broke up with you, Hunter,’ she reminded him gently.

  He was annoyed. ‘Oh, right. It must have been some other woman called Emma who told me to get lost when I asked her to marry me.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you to get lost.’ She knew she was raising irrelevant objections, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘I told you I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to marry.’

  Hunter clicked his tongue in irritation. He hated it when she got this way, calm, practical, reassuring. This was Emma the psychiatrist talking, not Emma the human being. Any minute now she’d ask him how he was feeling about his anger.

  ‘Same thing.’ His voice was dismissive.

  ‘No, it’s not the same thing.’ She took an angry swallow of coffee. ‘It’s not the same thing at all, Hunter. But you obviously interpreted it that way at the time.’

  ‘How many ways are there to interpret the phrase “Piss off”?’

  She was losing her cool. ‘I didn’t use those words or anything like them. And even if I had, most men wouldn’t have reacted by rushing off and marrying the first woman they bumped into.’ She took a deep breath, already regretting the words, but she carried on, unable to stop herself. ‘Don’t give me this wounded-male act, Hunter. How do you think I felt? You talk about break-ups? The first time I knew there was a break-up was when I got your bloody wedding invitation.’

  ‘What did you expect me to do when you chucked me? Join a monastery?’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to do anything.’

  ‘That’s it, Emma. That’s exactly it. That was the problem. You didn’t want me, but you didn’t want anyone else to have me either.’

  ‘The problem was, we never actually discussed the problem. That was the fecking problem.’

  Very good, Emma, she thought to herself furiously. How articulate. How professional.

  ‘Well, let’s talk about it now.’

  ‘No. Your wife seems to think I’m waiting for you, lying outside your door like some faithful lapdog, ready to be called back again. I don’t want her to think that. I don’t want anybody to think that.’

  He stared at her. ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’

  ‘What sort of a question is that? Of course I don’t mind.’

  As he left, slamming the door, she buried her head in her hands and took long, deep breaths. With all their overwhelming problems, why had they chosen tonight to chuck emotional crockery at each other? It was stupid, destructive and ultimately pointless. Yet she knew he’d raised a valid question.

  Why hadn’t she been honest with Hunter when he’d proposed to her? Why hadn’t she ever told him the real reason she’d turned him down?

  She remembered the scene in the restaurant two and a half years ago. The overwhelming feeling of panic as the man she loved asked her to marry him.

  The diners at the other tables had smiled as he produced the ring. Some had even clapped. But as Hunter looked into her eyes, all Emma could think about was another face – the face of her own father, twisted and ugly with drink. She remembered the apprehensive expression on her mother’s face every time the key turned i
n the front door at night.

  Being married to an alcoholic had been a never-ending hell. It had blighted her mother’s life. That was never going to happen to her. Never …

  ‘I’m sorry, Emma.’ Hunter had returned from the bathroom and was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘I’d no right to say those things to you. I was completely out of order.’

  She nodded. ‘Me too. Wrong time, wrong place.’

  ‘Wrong man, wrong woman. Wrong bloody life. Let’s forget it. I’ll be gone in the morning anyway.’

  BEFORE he settled down to sleep in Emma’s spare room, Hunter phoned Mark and gave him a full briefing on the bizarre happenings at Ardee Terrace. Mark reacted with stunned silence.

  He gave a long, low whistle. ‘This is even bigger than I suspected, Hunter. You know what’s happened, don’t you? They’ve spirited Mags Jackson away somewhere. She could be pumped full of drugs in some prison hospital. More probably, she’s dead. Whoever we’re up against, this is big-time stuff.’ He gave an incredulous gasp. ‘They planted a substitute in her house? Even got a bogus neighbour and a tame cop to identify the stand-in as the real Mags Jackson? We’re talking major logistics here. We’re not just dealing with Valentia’s gangland friends. We’re talking State Intelligence, we’re talking Secret Service or Special Branch.’

  Hunter said nothing.

  ‘I could certainly use some good news from your side,’ he said at last. ‘Did you have any better luck when you got back to your police sources?’

  Mark took a deep breath. ‘I hate to tell you this, but it’s not looking good. My cop sources are going to ground faster than prairie dogs on speed.’

  Hunter groaned. ‘Did you talk directly to your main contact? The cop who showed you Mags’s statement?’

  ‘I talked to him for exactly seven seconds. Just long enough for him to say he didn’t know me, had never heard of me and had never talked to me in his entire life. Click, brrr.’

  ‘No. Oh, my God, no.’ Hunter thought about it for a moment, then brightened slightly. ‘Perhaps he was just worried that someone was tapping the line. Maybe he’ll get back to you later.’

  ‘Could be.’ Mark’s voice was not encouraging. ‘But you get a feel for these things, Hunter, and this guy wasn’t just a bit worried. This guy was scared.’

  THE next morning, Emma and Hunter said little to each other. The mood between them was one of polite formality.

  They shared breakfast in silence, and afterwards Hunter fed breakfast to Robbie, complete with aeroplane sound effects, while she bathed and dressed. Then Hunter showered and shaved and tried to make himself as presentable as possible in the same clothes he’d worn through the rain yesterday.

  It was a sunny, gusty day, with the wind chasing ragged clouds across a perfectly blue sky, as they drove towards Northwest Airport, more than fifty miles away.

  ‘Thanks for paying for my flight,’ he said as she dropped him off outside the tiny terminal building.

  ‘You’re welcome. I figured you wouldn’t want another bus journey.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back as soon as –’

  She shook her head. ‘Forget it, Hunter. It’s on me.’

  On the far side of the tarmac, a security man gestured to Emma to drive on. This was a set-down-only area.

  ‘What went wrong?’ Hunter asked her.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

  ‘I mean, between us. Last night.’

  She shrugged and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek. ‘Nothing’s wrong, Hunter. We’d both had a bad day. Let’s put it behind us. Have a nice flight.’

  ‘But, Emma –’

  ‘Here, I nearly forgot.’ She fished in her purse and handed him a couple of banknotes. ‘You’ll need something to pay for a taxi home.’

  She saw Hunter’s reaction and realised his pride had been wounded.

  ‘Thanks.’ He took the money anyway. He had no option.

  ‘I have to drive on,’ said Emma. The security man was walking over with that determined expression only security men can summon up. ‘Give me a call tonight and we’ll talk.’

  She smiled as cheerfully as she could and drove off, feeling her heart sink as she watched his lonely figure grow smaller in her mirror.

  EMMA took her time driving home. There was no need to hurry; Robbie was fast asleep in the back of the car, and there was nothing in Passage North that she particularly wanted to return to.

  Instead of taking the direct road, she found herself following the winding coastal route along the Athmore Peninsula. She remembered this peninsula as it had been in her childhood: a beautiful, windswept wilderness of grass and sand and bog myrtle. The sky had seemed enormous on the low horizon, and the cold, fresh air had been loud with the cries of rare birds – terns, skuas, Brent geese – all blown in on the storm winds from the frozen Arctic.

  Now all that had gone. The wild birds had long since disappeared and there was hardly a square foot of the Athmore Peninsula that hadn’t been paved over by hacienda holiday homes and jerry-built hotels.

  Why had she chosen to spend her life in this bleak, grey corner of the world? Was it the ‘official’ reason she gave to everyone – that she loved her birthplace and didn’t feel at home anywhere else? Or was it really because she’d fooled herself into thinking that, by helping alcoholics in Athmore, she was somehow paying back a childhood debt of guilt to her long-dead father?

  Robbie was beginning to wake up. Emma pulled into the pink-paved car park of the Atlantica Hotel for lunch, and tried to dismiss such subversive thoughts from her head. After all, she had other, more urgent problems to deal with right now.

  She opened her glove compartment. Inside was a square white envelope. She’d received it through her letterbox that morning, but she hadn’t mentioned it to Hunter.

  It contained a garish sympathy card, bordered in black. And on it someone had scrawled two words: Robbie Macaulay.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE barman kept staring at Hunter. Every couple of minutes he’d look down at something under the bar counter, check it, and compare it with Hunter’s face. Once or twice, Hunter caught him in the act. The barman immediately looked away. It didn’t make sense, and it certainly didn’t do anything to ease Hunter’s troubled state of mind.

  He took a sip of his coffee and glanced at his watch. Mark Tobey was late. It was nearly four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and there was only a handful of customers in Katie Maher’s pub, a venerable bar just off one of the main shopping streets in Dublin’s city centre. In the ancient wooden snugs, a few shoppers tucked into bar snacks, and at the far end of the bar a couple of old men were ensconced for the afternoon with their pints of stout. Beyond them, at an old pine refectory table, two polyester-suited men who looked like salesmen were loudly telling racist jokes and steadily working their way through a formidable array of gin-and-tonics.

  The tense atmosphere was shattered as a public phone sounded an old-fashioned metallic ring at the corner of the gloomy bar. The barman answered it on an extension in an alcove behind the counter. He listened for a second, then turned towards Hunter.

  ‘It’s for you, Mr Hunter,’ he said.

  Hunter stared back at him. He’d never met the barman before in his life. How had he known that the call was for him? How did he know his name?

  ‘You can take it over there,’ said the barman, nodding towards the phone kiosk near the bar entrance.

  ‘Thanks.’ Hunter moved towards the kiosk and gingerly lifted the phone. The handset smelled as though the contents of an old ashtray had been marinated in stout and poured over it.

  ‘Hi, Hunter?’

  ‘Mark. What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, where does one start?’ Mark was throwing histrionics again. ‘I’m sorry. As you’ve no doubt realised by now, I won’t be able to make it for lunch. Something important’s come up and I have to follow it up. Use it or lose it.’

  ‘You mean a
new lead on the Valentia case?’ Hunter couldn’t disguise the note of desperate optimism in his voice.

  There was a long pause, and Hunter imagined Mark must be kicking himself for raising his editor’s hopes.

  ‘No. Sorry, Hunter. Something else entirely.’ He sighed an eloquent apology. ‘You see, life goes on, and we still have to earn our bread and butter.’

  ‘Oh, right. No problem.’ In their business, all appointments were subject to cancellation at the last minute. That was always understood. You didn’t ignore a good news lead. It was the rarest and most valuable item of currency of their profession. ‘Give me a call later at home and we’ll make another arrangement.’

  ‘Sure. By the way, Hunter …’

  Hunter felt the hair on his neck prickle. There was something ominous about Mark’s forced casualness, the hesitancy in his voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you read the papers yet?’

  ‘Yes. I read them this morning. Nothing really new since yesterday.’

  There was a leaden silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘You obviously haven’t,’ said Mark quietly. ‘Jesus, Hunter, why do I always have to be the one who brings you the worst news? Go out of the bar. There’s a news-stand to your right. Get a copy of the Evening Monitor. I’ll phone you back.’

  Hunter slowly replaced the phone.

  He walked towards the news-stand and saw his own face staring back at him long before he reached the stall. He couldn’t really have missed it.

  Several copies of the Evening Monitor were stacked up vertically on the wire stand. The whole stand looked like a single large display featuring Hunter’s face in multiple images, like one of those Andy Warhol screen-prints of Elvis or Marilyn Monroe.

  He moved closer and stopped to stare at the huge colour photo that dominated each front page. It was a close-up of the top half of his face, taken the previous night as he was driven away from Ardee Terrace in the police car. Because of the low camera angle, the metal bodywork of the car door cut off the lower part of his face, almost like a bandanna mask. His haggard eyes, reddened by the flash, stared out at the camera through a window streaked by rain. The effect was that of a red-eyed maniac glaring out through prison bars. The headline screamed four words: ‘Eyes of a Stalker.’