The Watchful Eye

by Priscilla Masters

He swivelled his head up specifically to meet her eyes and deliver that negative but she mistook the movement, fluttered her eyes closed and planted her lips on his in a gesture which should have felt romantic but succeeded in feeling insincere and stagy. She tasted of chocolate and coffee and all he could think of was Claudine.

  Marie Westbrook even smelt wrong. Of antiseptic and penicillin and underlying that an unpleasant, cloying perfume. He managed to push her away. ‘No.’

  The nurse faced him with a hard look in her eyes. ‘Sure, are you, Danny? You don’t want the shoulder I’m offering you?’

  There was something ominous in her voice so Daniel felt he was in the presence of some hostile being. He struggled to regain something of their previous friendship.

  ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘But maybe I’m not ready for another relationship just yet. Things are tricky here at work.’ It felt lame.

  Her returning stare was cool and appraising. He feared she would say something cutting but she didn’t. She simply stared for a long minute or two, her face now impassive. Then, without saying another word, she turned around, left the room and closed the door softly behind her.

  Daniel broke into a cold sweat. For a reason he could not put his finger on he wished very heartily that he had never had that accidental Internet date with the nurse.

  Or was it accidental? He had always thought it was too much of a coincidence. He tried to think back to the time when he had decided it was the way forward. He had found a leaflet, assumed it had either been left by one of the patients or one small piece of the hundreds of pieces of junk mail that bombarded the practice every single day it was open. It took the receptionists more than an hour each weekday morning to sift through it. Why wouldn’t an Internet dating site put a leaflet in a doctors’ surgery when it was well known that people in trouble flocked here, the unhappy, the recently divorced, the bereaved, the simply lonely and anyone with an entire myriad of problems which might put off a prospective partner. What better than to surf an Internet dating site?

  He had a feeling he would regret this for months to come.

  But Marie running her fingers through his hair had set up a hot chain reaction. She had sparked off a desire in him to speak to the French woman, to listen to her cool, accented English. The desire was so indestructible that after surgery he drove straight round to the policeman’s house.

  It was only as he pulled up outside the modest semi that he took time to think. What would he do if Brian or Bethan opened the door?

  In fact it was Claudine who opened the door, her eyes wide open and startled when she saw who it was. At the same time she must have recognised something strange in his face because her brow wrinkled with concern almost at once.

  ‘Daniel,’ she said quickly. ‘What are you doing here? Is Holly all right?’

  He felt silly now. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Holly’s fine. Claudine.’ He felt helpless now. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘Brian’s out,’ she said, her hand coming up quickly, almost defensively. Her face looked anxious.

  He felt even more helpless now. ‘It’s you I wanted to speak to,’ he said.

  She flashed him one of her warm smiles. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What am I thinking of? How impolite. Do come in.’

  She led him into the cream-coloured sitting room and sat down, opposite him.

  He began awkwardly. ‘You understand that anything I say to you is in confidence.’

  She looked almost insulted. ‘I realise that,’ she said stiffly. ‘You don’t have to explain that.’

  Then it all spilt out, the allegation of sexual misconduct, his mistaken diagnosis with Maud Allen, and finally, his failure to prevent what would probably turn out to be the murder of a small child.

  She sat motionless before crossing the room and kneeling on the floor in front of him. ‘Daniel,’ she said, looking up into his face. ‘What an awful load you carry on your shoulders and you have no one to confide in. No wife to welcome you home from work, to speak to about the daily worries. You are so alone.’

  He reached out and touched her hair.

  The Victorians have a fine old phrase for it. They call it, with typically sly implication: Being found in a compromising position.

  Whatever we choose to call it, both eras would nod their heads in agreement. It was the worst possible moment for Brian Anderton to walk in. He took in the entire scene in in less than the time it took him to stride across the room. ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ he said when he was within punching distance of Daniel. ‘What have I barged in on?’

  Claudine staggered to her feet, her face sickly white. It was the first time Daniel had ever realised that she was nervous of her husband or that PC Brian Anderton was capable of flashes of violence.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said in his best surgery tone, the one he used on threatening patients, the drunks, the sick-note requesters, the cheating drug addicts on the government’s pathetically misguided methadone plan.

  Claudine took a step back, her eyes not leaving her husband’s face. ‘Nothing’s going on, Brian.’ She too was struggling to recover normality.

  Like Daniel, trying to take the heat out of the situation. Only neither of them realised how hot the situation really was.

  ‘Daniel was hoping to catch you in,’ she said quickly. ‘He has had some very unpleasant problems with patients.’

  Anderton visibly sneered, his top lip pulling away from his teeth like a horse straining in a race.

  ‘Well he’s keeping us pretty busy what with one thing and another. In fact I could spend my days investigating him.’ The sentence might have been addressed to his wife but it was Daniel who flinched at their implication.

  A policeman can always unearth something bad about you.

  Anderton hadn’t finished with him yet. He took one heavy, menacing step, towering over Daniel. ‘Offload your failings on someone else’s wife,’ he warned. ‘Leave mine alone and don’t ever come round here if I’m not here. I’ve heard about your lecherous behaviour at the surgery – with minors too.’ He took another threatening step forward. ‘You were lucky to get away with it, Doctor.’

  Daniel looked at Claudine who gave him the slightest of nods. For her sake he felt bound to raise some defence. ‘Look, Brian,’ he managed, ‘I’m not like that. Those allegations have been withdrawn. Leave it.’

  Anderton didn’t respond.

  So Daniel left the room – and the house – believing he would never go there again.

  As he walked up the High Street he was greeted as usual by the ‘Hello, Doctor’ brigade, but for once he didn’t return a single greeting. All he could think of was what he was going to say to Holly when she came for the weekend and pleaded with him to let her play with Bethan Anderton.

  He had forgotten all about his mother having arrived for the weekend. He remembered just as he inserted his key in the lock. She’d left it on the latch. For a moment he panicked as the door swung open.

  Then he remembered.

  ‘Danny,’ she said. ‘Darling. You’re home.’

  It was the last straw.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Saturday, 20th May

  Brian was sitting very still in the dimmed room, his left hand reaching down for cans of lager. The right clicked the lighter, again and again and again. Although his body was still, in his mind there was frenzied activity. He was working it all out in military style. First of all the watching. All soldiers know the importance of the initial surveillance. Now he thought about it Gregory must have been staking out his house for months, watching his wife. Next came the stealing. Perhaps the pilfering of garments from the washing line had been a message meant for Claudine, a reminder of all they were sharing. Then had come the intrusion, cleverly masquerading as an innocent friendship while he, the rat, inched closer to his wife. He thought back to the day they had ‘accidentally’ bumped into each other at the children’s shop. Now he thought about it, it had been Claudine’s idea that they should go to th
at particular shop to buy Bethan a pair of wellies. He would have gone into Stafford. His eyes narrowed. She must think he was thick. Anderton took a long swig at his beer, clicked the lighter and watched the flame with something approaching a smile. It seemed completely random – whether it fired or not. Sometimes it would light on the first click, at others it took three or even four. He became fascinated in this careless confusion when so much could depend on it. It only took one small spark from a 90p lighter to explode a bomb or start a forest fire. One small spark. That was all it took.

  All the time the curtains remained tightly drawn. He enjoyed the dimness. If Claudine or Bethan so much as opened the door he simply growled at them. So they left him all day and sat together in the kitchen, Claudine aware of a feeling of sick dread.

  Somewhere, in a dark, dusty little corner of her mind, hidden beneath festoons of spiders’ webs and bat-shapes, she had sensed that there was a dark side to Brian, the door of which he kept tightly shut. In one way, if she was honest with herself, knowing there was this dangerous side to him had made him exciting. But occasionally when the door swung open – as when he had struck her last week, or shouted at her when she had pegged her clothes on the washing line after he had instructed her to keep them indoors – what she glimpsed in the room beyond frightened her. She took a nervous sip of coffee. When she had been a child and she had been frightened she would hide her head in her mother’s lap. But her mother was miles away, still in a suburb of Paris, an unwelcome and infrequent guest at her daughter’s home.

  Claudine looked up. Bethan was sitting motionless, watching her.

  Why, Claudine thought, did the underwear business upset him so much? What did it mean to him that it had not to her? After all, it was he who had said it was just someone with odd habits who had stolen the lingerie. A pervert, a man who derived sexual excitement from wearing women’s clothes. There was no harm in it, no threat, was there? It was not really personal, was it? That was what he had said – at first. But she sensed that it had begun, at some point, to mean something else – something more frightening, something which had opened the door to his dark side and now he had moved into that area and closed the door behind him. She could no longer access the husband she had known. He had gone from her.

  She wanted to speak to Daniel about it. Perhaps she could book in to see him at the surgery and tell him that Brian was beginning to frighten her. That he looked at her as though she was a stranger, spoke differently, acted strangely, had become withdrawn and hostile, that his eyes no longer rested on her with love but with suspicion and something very near dislike. She sat, still and silent, deep in her thoughts until she looked up and realised how very quiet Bethan was being. When the child did speak, even her voice was strange.

  ‘Won’t Holly be able to come here and play again?’ she asked solemnly.

  We all perceive events through our own eyes, from our own perspective and this was her daughter’s.

  Claudine reached out and touched Bethan’s hand.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘But she’s really nice. I liked her.’ She looked keenly at her mother. ‘But Daddy doesn’t, does he?’

  ‘He doesn’t dislike Holly.’

  ‘Then it’s Holly’s dad, isn’t it, that he doesn’t like?’

  Claudine said nothing but listened to the total silence which came from the sitting room. Too quiet, she thought. It was not healthy or safe for him to sit there, drinking lager, alone, in the dark, all day, excluding wife and daughter while his thoughts went who knows where?

  Safe?

  Why had she used that particular word? What was unsafe about him? Brian was her husband. Surely there was nothing unsafe about him.

  Brian was piecing everything together. Sewing it into a recognisable shape, stitch by stitch.

  The missing clothes, the jewellery, the personal items. Who but Gregory? Taking trophies.

  He didn’t reason that it was not in Daniel’s psyche to commit such an aberrant, trivial crime. He did not apply logic at all because his own mind was spiralling out of control.

  Red mist was forming.

  He clicked the cigarette lighter again and again in his fingers. Sometimes it sparked and flamed but other times it didn’t. He peered at it, less than an inch from his nose, as though he was very short-sighted, though he wasn’t, and tried to guess which times it would work and which times it would fail. After forty or more clicks he realised that it was completely random. He sat up, smiling. So let it be random. How it all ended up would be left to chance. He only needed to plan how. Where.

  And like the good soldier he could bide his time, pick his moment, wait and see.

  Something in Brian still struggled to retain a hold on reality, to separate the two events, the eight-year-old plea for help and the intrusion on his wife, but control was slipping away so he gave up. They were one, and by dealing with this in a controlling and decisive way he could merge the two and thus affect a satisfactory ending. He had only done what he must do.

  So that was that.

  His gaze wandered towards the door. Claudine was helpless. He could see that now. It was up to him to protect her as he had failed to protect that other woman, so long ago. This time he would act earlier.

  He would take the initiative.

  But the question that burnt in his mind was, was she innocent or guilty? How far had things gone? He decided that he would set her various tests to find out. He would know when she was lying and when she was telling the truth. He would return home unexpectedly, check in her purse, read the numbers from her mobile phone. He would follow her to Sunday Mass, check up on her when she was supposed to be shopping. He was a policeman. He could think of hundreds of ways to expose his wife. All he had to do was to pretend to be normal.

  At eight in the evening he finally stirred himself, feeling stiff after the hours of inactivity. He flexed his muscles and worked out a plan of action. He clicked the lighter one last, satisfactory time, watched the small flame ignite, splutter and die and then he smiled.

  Back in control.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The weekend passed well for Daniel. Holly and his mother seemed to be forging a better relationship and Holly only mentioned her newfound friend once, suggesting they asked her to join them and when Daniel said it probably wasn’t a good idea she did not mention her again.

  He tried to ring Claudine just before lunch but no one answered so he left a friendly, neutral message and hung up. They must be on a family outing, he decided and was part relieved and part slightly jealous.

  The three of them went for a walk in Doxey Marshes to see the swans and then called in for coffee at Costas, finishing up meandering along the aisles at Sainsbury’s to pick up something for supper and tomorrow’s lunch. Holly took her grandmother’s hand happily, selecting vegetables and fruit with all the enthusiasm and commitment of a gourmet and he found himself relaxing for the first time in ages. Something in Holly’s artless chatter seemed to bring out something less selfish, less self-absorbed in his mother, so she listened to her granddaughter, hardly interrupting, her head bent over to one side.

  The only slightly bitter note in the entire day was a text message from Marie asking whether he was free over the weekend. She said she was dying to meet his daughter, offered to pop over and cook his dinner and then… He fingered the reply button, trying to decide whether to respond with a polite, Sorry, I’m busy, mother here! followed maybe by a friendly, See you at work next week, or simply ignore it. He felt awkward. Perhaps that one, accidental date would embarrass their future working relationship. Something told him she was a persistent woman.

  In the end he decided to ignore it. Mobile phones can so easily be out of range, he told himself. There is nothing to tell the texter that their message has been read.

  Even so, he felt wrong-footed and rude. She was a nice woman who deserved a nice man. But not him.

  A heavy shower finally drove them home through din
gy streets underneath a distinctly threatening sky but they returned happy and wet. As he walked along the hall he could see the answerphone flashing a message. While his mother and Holly dealt with the shopping he pressed play to hear Claudine’s voice unrecognisably shrill.

  ‘Daniel, it’s Claudine. Brian is behaving oddly. It’s best you don’t telephone – please, at least for a while. I think he’s having some sort of a breakdown. I’m worried and he seems to think we are closer friends than we are. Please take care of yourself and of Holly.’

  The line went dead, leaving Daniel staring at it stupidly.

  Something in him was warning him, a red light flashing inside his head, which distracted him from rational thought. All evening it blinked inside his brain, through the extended game of Monopoly, Holly’s incessant chatter and a late supper of cheese and biscuits. His mother disappeared upstairs at ten o’clock, muttering something about packing ready for the morning and for the first time in his life he was sorry to see her go. As it was half term she had agreed to drive Holly all the way back to her mother in Birmingham. It would be a huge detour but he had the sneaky feeling that his mother wanted to check up on how Elaine was doing. Infuriatingly she still harboured desires to see them reunited no matter how much they both tried to persuade her that their marriage was, thankfully and irrevocably, ended.

  He tucked Holly up, leaving her sleepy, in bed, unable to stop himself from whispering his dream of the cottage, the pony, them being together. He watched her eyes light up. ‘Really, Daddy? Really?’ She put her arms around his neck. ‘Then will I be able to come and live with you? I shall call my pony Chocolate. Whatever colour he is.’ She lay back against the pillow, a smile lighting her face. He closed the door behind her, thinking how very much he wanted this life. His daughter, a home, even his mother. Nearby at least.

  Yet, he had a little voice nagging him that Holly thought that life with him would be endless Saturdays and shopping trips with no credit limit, that each and every meal would be either Gary Rhodes gourmet, Jamie Oliver or in a restaurant. He walked downstairs slowly. This weekend pact was so false. It wasn’t really what life was like. As he reached the bottom step he blinked at the vision of hordes of little princesses spoilt by their absent fathers.