The Watchful Eye

by Priscilla Masters

  She always dressed as though for a bridge party, in tweed suits, summer and winter alike, the only concession being that in summer she wore a silk blouse while in winter a sweater completed the ensemble.

  Wondering who, in Eccleston, had witnessed the arrival of his mother he shot a glance up and down the road, grateful that at this time of the morning it was deserted apart from Guy Malkin who was either on his way to work at the Co-op or lurking with intent. He looked furtive enough to be doing the latter. Daniel heaved a great big sigh and closed the door behind them, placing the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and following his mother into the kitchen where she was already filling the kettle.

  His mother was addicted to Earl Grey tea and drank gallons of the stuff. What good health she confessed to she attributed to Earl Grey – himself. Daniel didn’t mind how much of the wretched stuff she drank. His only objection was that without even asking him what he would like to drink she handed him a mug of the offending tea – which he couldn’t stand. He thought it tasted of dust. Ancient dust.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, looking around her with a critical eye. He braced himself for the inevitable criticism of the décor, the lack of cleanliness, the untidiness. Anything. Any perceived shortcoming in his home would justify her moving in but she sipped her tea innocently enough then turned her eyes towards him without speaking.

  It was left to Daniel to open up the conversation. ‘You haven’t driven all the way down here, surely. Not just to…’

  His voice trailed away as her face tightened. ‘Of course I have, Daniel,’ she said severely. ‘As I said. If you won’t come and visit me, well then. It’s up to me, isn’t it? Or I shall lose contact with my one and only grandchild.’

  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

  It was the new answer. The new buzz word. The current way forward in medical circles. Daniel drank his tea very slowly and wondered whether he dared. It was taking quite a risk.

  He made his decision. ‘Why is it, Mother,’ he said abruptly, ‘that whenever I see you or talk to you I instantly feel guilty?’

  Unlike a patient his mother wasn’t in the least bit fazed. ‘Perhaps it’s because of the appalling way you treat me, Daniel,’ she said.

  He might have known it wouldn’t work with her.

  He sighed again, drank the tea, and felt deflated.

  ‘I take it Holly is coming in the morning?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So what plans did you have for the weekend?’

  He didn’t like her use of the past tense. The truth was that he hadn’t made any plans. He had sort of hoped that Claudine would suggest something – or that something exciting would occur to him – or that the local paper would suggest some event or special entertainment they could attend, but nothing had come up. In fact the weekend stretched ahead a little bleakly. He could be honest and say that to constantly plan some little treat, weekend after weekend, was hard work. But that would imply boredom with his own daughter.

  And yet he knew how very unnatural it was, that all their time together, this father and daughter, who loved each other so much, should be spent as ‘treats’. It left little time for simply being together, to become familiar with each other without the sparkle of a treat. It was, in a way, a strain, an effort. Too much effort when all that he wanted was normality.

  An ordinary existence with his daughter.

  The worst thing was that buried deep he knew how he could achieve it. Weighted by the promise of a pony and her newfound friend, Bethan, Holly would elect to live with him. And if her daughter really insisted, Elaine, with her new husband, would surely agree. Holly was a persistent little thing and once she had set her mind on something she was practically impossible to divert.

  He allowed his mind to drift on. He and Claudine, doing all sorts of family activities, almost like husband and wife.

  His mother was watching him suspiciously. ‘I hadn’t really made any definite plans,’ he said.

  Brian and Claudine were facing each other in the kitchen over breakfast. He was making a pretence of reading his paper but really he was watching his wife intently out of the corner of his eye. He had opened the conversation innocently enough, with a casual question. No point in arousing her suspicions too early. Best not to put her on her guard.

  ‘Did those earrings ever turn up?’

  Claudine frowned. ‘No,’ she said crossly. ‘They didn’t. I can’t think where they can have got to. I have looked everywhere.’

  Brian lowered his paper so he could read her face better. ‘And what about the underwear?’

  She gave a typical Gallic shrug: shoulders raised simultaneously with a pursing of the lips. ‘Those neither,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what happens in this house sometimes.’ She giggled, walked behind her husband and put her hands on his shoulders, massaging them gently. ‘It swallows them up.’

  ‘You might try bolting the front door and leaving through the back.’ But he was aware that he was speaking without conviction. He wasn’t sure he believed in this phantom intruder who left no evidence, simply slipped into the house, took personal items of his wife’s and slipped out again. In fact the more he thought about it he could thread it all together. Daniel Gregory and his wife. His wife was having an affair and sometimes she left belongings at his house – earrings, the odd pair of knickers, trophies he could gloat over after she had gone. Claudine was planning to leave him. She was trying to pluck up courage to break the news. The two little girls had been deliberately introduced to each other to make Claudine’s flight easier. Did they think he was a fool? That he didn’t realise? Brian Anderton smiled. Well – they would learn one day. It might take weeks or even months but he would confront them with his knowledge of their guilt.

  Claudine flashed him one of her wide, innocent smiles unaware that her husband was deep in his own dark thoughts.

  Don’t fall for this, Brian. She’s playing you along. Don’t trust her. She’s laughing at you. Look at her. She’s laughing at you. Look at her eyes, twinkling with fun achieved at your expense. Don’t let her make a fool of you.

  He wished he could laugh with her as he used to in the old days. He sat, wooden, at the breakfast table, staring ahead of him, his shoulders tense. Claudine finally got the message. She stopped rubbing his shoulders and flopped into the chair opposite. ‘Hey, serious,’ she teased.

  His resentment flared into anger. He scowled at her.

  ‘Brian?’ she asked uncertainly.

  He wanted so much to trip her up.

  Expose her.

  ‘If someone’s stealing your things,’ he said slowly, leaning forward into his folded arms, ‘at first they simply took them from the washing line. Your underwear. But… Well – let’s just say it’s escalated. How do you think he could have found your earrings or the underwear?’

  ‘You’re imagining it,’ she said, pouting. ‘You’re just trying to scare me. Frighten me. I must have made a mistake. Been careless, mislaid them. There is no other explanation.’

  He’d had enough. ‘What about the key you leave in the most obvious place in the world?’

  She grew panicky then. ‘You think he’s been inside?’

  Slowly he nodded. ‘I do, Claudine,’ he said.

  ‘But surely nobody would dare,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You are the policeman here, Brian.’ She reached and stroked the back of his hand. ‘Please say it isn’t true, that you’re making it up. It can’t be. This is a peaceful town. Law abiding. Someone would have seen a person getting into the house.’

  ‘Perhaps someone did,’ he said. ‘I shall be making enquiries.’

  ‘But, Brian,’ she said nervously, her eyes wide. ‘I’m here for most of the time.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She would have liked to ignore the menacing tone in his voice but it was impossible. She stood up, retied her apron around her waist and stood in front of him. ‘I think you’re just trying to scare me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think anyone
is watching this house, stalking us and stealing things. I think, Brian, that because you are a policeman, you are suspicious and see a criminal around every corner, behind every tree.’ She bent to empty the dishwasher and Brian felt a hot flame of fury shoot through him. If she’d seen what he’d seen, watched terror grow in a woman’s eyes, seen fear paralyse her until she could no longer breathe. If she’d seen a woman terrorised until she was no longer able to leave her home, do her job, care for her family. If she’d seen the evil that men can do without laying a finger on the person then she would be frightened too. She wouldn’t mock him then, but appeal to him to help her.

  But maybe she liked it. Perhaps she wasn’t a reluctant victim but a willing participant. There was always another side to every story.

  He was searching for a sign – any sign that she was being unfaithful to him. Had she been making up to the Doctor? What if…? The little voices were insistent. She was alone in the day, when Bethan had gone to school. Gregory had free time in the day too. The surgery was closed in the afternoon. Plenty of opportunity.

  His fingers closed around the cigarette lighter and he fumbled with the flint. One click, two clicks and it fired. He watched the flame flicker. Flames could grow into…He squeezed his eyes shut but he could still hear the screaming, see the human torch, smell the burning flesh.

  He knew exactly how it had all started. She liked to flirt, to tease, to plant little seeds in his brain. Well – maybe she had better take care. People could be pushed too far.

  ‘Please, Constable, sir, Sergeant. Help me. Surely the law protects?’

  His face was sneering. The law protect?

  The law gives jobs to people, learns how to argue that black is white, mistrusts those it should lean on and always, always, makes excuses, for the blacks, the Asians, the drug pushers, the single parents…The list goes on and on.

  ‘Brian?’

  And she had no idea.

  He stared at her, flung his paper down onto the table, knocking over the milk jug, and left without an apology, muttering something about going to work and slamming the kitchen door behind him.

  Seconds later Bethan peered round. ‘Daddy’s in a bad mood,’ she commented cheerfully.

  Brian stopped off to buy some cigarettes. He didn’t really like smoking and Claudine forbade it in the house but today he badly needed to rebel. He wanted to do something. Anything of which Claudine would disapprove. And so he bought the cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth and lit it with the lighter. Guy Malkin was strolling down the street and grinned at him. ‘Didn’t know you smoked, Constable Anderton. Bad for your health, you know.’

  ‘I don’t normally,’ Brian said through clenched teeth and was annoyed with himself for feeling so stupid.

  He puffed on the cigarette with a feeling of wonderfully sinful rebellion. He strode up the High Street, passed Francesco’s hairdressing and beauty, and the library and the millennium clock. When he reached the mini roundabout he crossed it and strode towards the police station.

  It was his belief that cigarettes had only caught on because they were banned. It was the fourteen-year-olds behind the sheds at school who started and then found themselves unable to stop. By the time Brian Anderton was standing in the police station car park he was completely sick of the foul taste in his mouth. He dropped the end, stubbed it out with his foot and reached into his pocket for a peppermint. As he stood and looked around him he felt his dislike grow for the new supermarket they were building, almost wrapping itself around the tiny police station as though to assert its superior size.

  He heaved a great big sigh and walked inside. Time to face another day shift.

  Not only did Daniel have to run the gauntlet of his mother cooking an inadequate lunch of spaghetti on toast but lunchtime brought another unwelcome telephone call from Richard Snape. Snape caught him at home just as his mother was stubbornly rinsing all the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. A pointless exercise in his view. The habit infuriated him because he could have had the kitchen tidied up by now and be sitting in front of the computer screen renewing the search for the woman of his dreams. Someone who wasn’t married and didn’t bloody well work for him so could waylay him in the corridor.

  He simply couldn’t have a relationship with his practice nurse. Romance in the surgery might work in the soaps but real life was another matter altogether. Besides – the truth was that he didn’t fancy Marie Westbrook one little bit. He found her just a little bit intrusive. His tastes led in another direction completely. A direction he was just beginning to sense could lead to dangerous waters. No – he was much safer surfing the net for another pretty fish.

  ‘Doctor Gregory, it’s Richard Snape here,’ the solicitor said in a suspiciously hearty tone. ‘Do you have a moment for a very brief word?’

  Why is it that any contact with a solicitor fills you with foreboding? Daniel gritted his teeth.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I did mention to you, I believe, that Mrs Allen,’ he experimented with a tentative joke, ‘your benefactress, to put it in Dickensian terms,’ a little snigger, ‘had a niece.’

  Daniel’s heart sank. He knew what was coming next.

  And he was right.

  ‘I believe I did also mention the fact that she may decide to contest the will.’ Sly Snape waited for Daniel to confirm.

  ‘Yes,’ he said tersely. He could almost feel the jaws of the trap snap shut behind him.

  Snape continued. ‘Unfortunately she has taken this business one step further. She is claiming some measure of coercion in the redrafting of her aunt’s will. Particularly in the light of the very peculiar circumstances surrounding her aunt’s very tragic death.’

  Thank you, Lord. You giveth and you taketh away.

  Daniel could feel the cottage and more importantly his dream slip-sliding away from him. He felt panicked into impotent protestation. ‘She can’t think that I engineered…’ His voice faded. ‘I shall take legal…’ He reminded himself he was speaking to legal advice.

  ‘There will be no need for that.’ He was like a nanny consoling a child with a grazed knee. ‘I’m sure it’ll come to nothing,’ the solicitor said, ‘but I felt you would want to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Daniel said flatly, the wind taken right out of his sails. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  The solicitor spoke again. ‘You won’t, of course, need to answer these allegations. I thought I would draft a reply and we could revise the text together. How would that be?’

  ‘Fine. Just fine.’

  So his dreams of the pretty little cottage, My Little Pony and a permanent existence with his own daughter, Claudine popping in and out, faded and were replaced by yet more finger-pointing.

  Daniel felt a quick surge of resentment. When he had first joined the practice in Eccleston, The Yellow House had seemed the obvious choice for the GP of the town. In fact three or four doctors had lived there before, ever since it had first been built more than two hundred years ago. But the truth was that he was sick of stepping out of the front door straight into a consultation room because whoever was passing was invariably one of his patients and they always wanted to ask him something. He had no privacy. At first it had been a novelty. He had felt part of the town, a real country GP. But now it was a drag. The thought of the isolated, lovely cottage, with its own field, waiting for a little bay pony, had been more than simply a means to secure his daughter; it had been an escape from the intrusion of his patients and now the chance that had been dangled in front of his eyes was under threat. He could not bear to see it slip away.

  His mother was watching him like a hawk. ‘Everything all right, Daniel dear?’ Her yellowed teeth seemed wolfish and predatory.

  ‘Fine.’

  Guy had watched the policeman walking down the street, puffing amateurishly on a cigarette like a sixteen-year-old, trying to look nonchalant. His eyes followed him all the way down, past the jeweller’s and the chocolate shop right up until he crossed the road
. Then he turned the other way.

  An hour and a half later, Claudine, the little basket over her arm, tripped down the road.

  But this time Claudine had done as Brian had instructed her. She had bolted the front door and left through the back door, locking the mortise and tenon lock and pocketing the new key so his own key was useless. He inserted it, felt the resistance and cursed, feeling a sudden rage against her. Didn’t she know what he took he took out of love, to evoke her, conjure her up? He needed her.

  Didn’t she know that if he had nothing new of hers she might fade?

  At the back of his mind was fear.

  He was on to him.

  The policeman was on to him.

  So when he was on the late shift at the Co-op and Anderton presented himself at the till his hand shook. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘A bottle of whisky,’ Anderton muttered.

  Guy Malkin took it down from the shelf and handed it over.

  The policeman snatched it from him, gave him a twenty-pound note, didn’t even bother to check the change and disappeared through the door. Even then Guy Malkin was shaking.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He was sitting in the surgery with his head in his hands. He didn’t want to go home to an evening spent with his mother. Minutes passed before he was aware that someone else was in the room with him. He didn’t look up and the next moment he felt fingers running through his hair.

  ‘Poor Danny,’ she said softly. ‘Poor little Danny. Something’s upset you, hasn’t it?’ She bent and kissed the top of his head, straddled her hands along his shoulders, massaging them gently. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  He felt as though he was in a trap, tried to jerk his head away.

  I do want to talk but not with you.