by Archer, Sam
‘My God,’ he said. ‘You really don’t get it, do you? Anything I’ve been saying to you. Now or over the last few weeks.’
Rebecca’s brazen demeanour was beginning to crack as her control slipped. She put a faltering hand up to her throat. ‘She’s my daughter. I’m her mother. You’ve no right to keep her.’
‘I’ve every right. You’re still entitled to see her and spend time with her, even have her over at yours or take her on holiday sometimes. But she lives with me, Rebecca. End of discussion.’ He sighed. ‘Why don’t you just go back to London, Rebecca. Stop hanging around here, stop wasting your time. And mine.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Don’t you dare pull a stunt like this again.’ He headed for the door.
Behind him she said, ‘Last chance.’
‘What?’
‘This is your last chance, Tom. I’m warning you.’
Tom stopped. Slowly, deliberately, he turned back. Rebecca was standing by the bed, arms by her sides, her fists clenched. The sexy, pouting look had gone from her face and had been replaced by a dark, glowering expression he hadn’t seen before.
‘Yes, Rebecca? You’re warning me? Please tell me what about.’
‘Reconsider, or you’ll be sorry.’
‘Do your worst. I’ll be ready.’
‘No, you won’t.’
There was something about the certainty with which Rebecca said it, something about the hint of a smile that played about her lips, that made Tom ask: ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m just saying. I told you before, Tom, that you have no idea what I’m capable of. You’re about to find out.’
He resisted the impulse to take a step towards her. ‘If you do anything, anything, to harm Kelly –’
‘Oh, no, Tom.’ Her eyes were wide in faux innocence. ‘I’d never do anything to hurt her.’
It was only when he was through the doors of the hotel and striding back towards his car that he realised there’d been the ghost of an emphasis on the word her.
Chapter Eight
Even working freelance as she did, Chloe experienced the same feelings on a Monday morning as a nine-to-five officer worker: a sense of being slightly daunted by the week ahead, and an initial lethargy and reluctance to get going.
She’d conducted the interview with the deputy leader of the town council on Friday afternoon. It had been a cordial meeting, the councillor initially laying on the bonhomie with a shovel but retreating into defensiveness when Chloe pressed him on his organisation’s failure to address the estate residents’ concerns. Although she’d typed up the interview as close to word-for-word as she could recall it, Chloe had saved the writing of the actual article until today. It had been tempting to spend the weekend working on it, but she’d been determined to devote Saturday and Sunday to Jake, exclusively, with no room for work. And she’d stuck to it. On Saturday they’d driven to a new out-of-town zoo which turned out to be more out of town than she’d realised, and on Sunday they had travelled all the way to London to see a matinee children’s theatre production in the West End. Exhausted, but happy, Chloe had dropped into bed at ten on Sunday evening, slept for an unbroken nine hours, and awoke refreshed and ready for the day.
But with that Monday morning feeling, nonetheless.
She set up the dining room table methodically, her laptop in the centre, her printed notes to one side, her phone and coffee mug to the other. Jake was in her line of sight, playing happily on the rug. Sooner or later she’d need to set up a proper study, in the spare bedroom, but for now this arrangement suited her.
Her email inbox was full; she hadn’t checked it since Friday afternoon, quite deliberately. Chloe supposed catching up with emails was a forgivable indulgence before setting down to work, and didn’t represent Monday morning displacement activity designed to avoid work.
A few of the twenty or so emails were junk messages which had dodged her spam folder. These she deleted immediately. Three more were from friends and former colleagues in London, catching up. She saved these, to be replied to later on, at her leisure and when she could give them the attention they deserved. She’d been neglecting her old friends, she acknowledged guiltily.
The work emails she spent more time on. There were a couple from Mike Sellers, addressed to her personally and following up on a couple of queries she’d sent him on Friday after the interview, in which she’d asked about the ins and outs of the local council’s workings. Other emails were essentially memos, copied to all staff and freelancers attached to the Pemberham Gazette.
One of them was from a staff reporter at the paper to Mike Sellers. Chloe was one of several people copied in, and when she scanned the content she realised she’d probably been added inadvertently to the CC list, as a result of a copy-and-paste job. The email was about a story involving some fundraising event taking place in the town this summer.
Chloe was about to delete the message when an addendum at the end caught her eye:
PS. Thanks for the tip-off about the Dr Carlyle thing. Will look into ASAP and get back 2U.
Chloe read it and reread it. There was only one Dr Carlyle it could possibly be referring to. What was this all about?
She took a sip of her coffee and thought about it. She had to find out what it meant. But wouldn’t it seem intrusive of her if she simply rang up the reporter who’d sent the message and asked him about it? He’d copied the email to her by mistake, but was still responsible for having done so. Still, the correct thing to do in such cases was to delete the email as soon as you realised it wasn’t meant for you, and say no more about it.
Chloe decided that she was a journalist, after all, someone whose job it was to get to the truth even if it involved an indirect and sometimes cunning approach. She’d speak to Mike, her editor, on some pretext, and find a way to steer the conversation as subtly as possible to the subject of Tom Carlyle. It was easy enough to find reasons to speak to Mike given that she was busy writing a fairly major article for him.
She picked up the phone and rang the Gazette’s office. Mike’s secretary answered. The boss was in a meeting, and wouldn’t be out until lunchtime. Would Chloe like to leave a message? Chloe replied that she was calling about the story – Mike would know which one she meant – and wanted to speak to him non-urgently about it.
After she’d rung off, Chloe stared at the message on the screen. The Dr Carlyle thing... Might it be something to do with Tom’s custody problem? But why then would the Pemberham Gazette be interested? In the months Chloe had been associated with the Gazette she’d come to appreciate that it was a serious paper of record, committed to honest and professional reporting of news which might be of legitimate interest to the community. It wasn’t some muckraking rag, bent on stoking up scandal. It was hardly likely to pry into a citizen’s private business.
Had something happened to Tom? The possibility struck her with cold force. Chloe had been out of town for much of the weekend; might Tom have come to some harm in her absence? Surely not, she thought. For one thing, word would have spread already and Mrs McFarland would have been round like a shot to tell Chloe.
Untamed speculation was like weeds rapidly taking over the garden of the mind. Chloe knew this, and she remembered also how annoyed she’d been that the ladies of the town had been coming up with fanciful ideas about her and Tom. So she forced herself to put the cryptic email out of her thoughts and concentrate on the morning’s work.
By half past twelve in the afternoon, nearly four hours later, she had the first draft of her article finished. And a pretty decent draft it was, too, she thought proudly. It was a little rough around the edges, and she wasn’t convinced she’d quite got the balance right yet between straight reportage and editorialising; but on the whole it was a fine piece of work. She decided to take a break to prepare some lunch for herself and Jake, then have another read through her manuscript with a fresh eye. Perhaps she might even have the final draft ready for Mike by late afternoon, even though he neede
d it only on Wednesday.
At a little after three o’clock, when Chloe was deeply into a critical rereading of her article, her phone rang. It was Mike Sellers.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
Chloe had already thought up a few questions for him, some points of clarification about the article. He answered them readily, and sounded on the point of saying his goodbyes when Chloe said: ‘Have you got anything else lined up for me? Any story after this one?’
‘Yes, a couple, actually,’ said Mike. ‘Plus, there will probably be follow-ons from this one. Have things changed on the estate, three months on, et cetera.’
‘Anything or anyone for me to investigate?’ she said, in as casual a manner as she could manage.
There was a pause at the other end. Mike said: ‘What are you referring to, Chloe?’
‘Oh, nothing in particular. I just wondered if there were any juicy new stories brewing?’
Another silence. Then he sighed audibly. ‘So you’ve read the email, too.’
‘Email? Which one?’ But her pulse had quickened.
‘The one Simon sent to me, and copied to all and sundry by mistake. The one with the mysterious reference at the end.’
‘Dr Carlyle.’ She felt bold enough to come out and say it. She might be a journalist and therefore nosy by nature, but Mike was an even more seasoned pressman and had detected right away that she’d caught the scent of the story from the tone and nature of her questions.
‘Yes.’ He seemed to be deliberating at the other end, before he said, ‘Chloe, I know you’re a freelancer and not on my paper’s staff, so strictly speaking this isn’t any of your concern. But I’ve come to respect your discretion and your integrity enough to believe you need to be let in on a few details. Especially because you’ll hear about it sooner or later.’
‘Hear about what, Mike?’
‘I don’t want to say anything over the phone. And I certainly don’t want to put anything I writing, either. Look, I’m too busy to meet you today, but could you come in tomorrow morning, say around nine thirty? I’ll explain then.’
‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’
‘I can’t tell you any more, Chloe. Tomorrow at half past nine?’
‘Yes. I’ll be there.’
‘And Chloe?’
‘Yes?’
‘Keep this under your hat, will you?’
Her instinct, after Mike had rung off, was to phone Tom immediately. Even if not to pry into what was going on, she thought she could at least sound him out, gauge his state of mind, offer her support in some undefined way. But Mike was now a source of information, and one of the primary rules of a good journalist was that you protected your sources. So Chloe held off, and tried to turn her attention back to her work.
She knew as she did so that there’d be little more she’d accomplish that day; nor would her sleep be especially peaceful.
***
For Tom, it all began on Tuesday morning.
He was finishing the second of two cups of coffee while Kelly dawdled over her muesli at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. The doorbell rang and he glanced at the clock on the wall, a novelty timepiece based on Salvador Dali’s melting clock. Seven ten.
Nobody rang the doorbell at this hour.
Padding to the front door in his socks, he saw a human silhouette looming through the frosted glass in the small panel set at head height. Cautiously he opened the door and peered out.
A woman of about forty whom he didn’t recognise stood on the top step, dressed in a denim jacket and wielding a microphone the size of a small club. Slightly behind her a man hefted a camera which began clicking and whirring at soon as Tom put his head out.
‘Dr Thomas Carlyle?’ the woman said. ‘Leah Foster, Pember Valley News. I was wondering if you might be prepared to answer some questions.’
Tom glared at the cameraman who was snapping away as she spoke. The Pember Valley News was Pemberham’s other weekly paper. Tom hadn’t looked at it, but he knew it was a downmarket rag, built on appealing to the townspeople’s baser and more prurient appetites.
‘Questions about what?’
‘May we come in?’ asked the woman, taking a step forwards. Tom retreated and began to close the door. What was this – some sort of profile of local public figures? But why without appointment, and at seven in the morning?
‘I haven’t time for this now,’ he said curtly. ‘I’ve got to get to work and my daughter to nursery.’
He’d almost closed the door completely when the woman’s voice came through: ‘It’s concerning the allegations made against you.’
Tom stopped, pushed the door open once more.
‘Allegations?’
‘May we come in?’ she asked again.
‘No. Not until you tell me what this is about.’
Holding the microphone closer towards him, she said, ‘Dr Carlyle, do you deny the allegations?’
‘For heaven’s sake, what allegations?’ Tom regarded himself as an even-tempered man, but he was close to losing it. ‘And you can switch off that thing.’ He jabbed a finger in the direction of the camera.
The woman glanced round at the cameraman who lowered his equipment, nodding and smirking. ‘Got some good ones already, anyway,’ he muttered.
‘Allegations,’ Leah Foster recited, ‘that you behaved in an inappropriate manner with one of your female patients.’
‘What?’ Tom was appalled. What was the woman talking about?
‘Do you claim, then, that you haven’t even heard of these allegations?’ The reporter looked triumphant, as if she’d just landed a major scoop.’
‘No! I mean, yes, that’s exactly what I’m claiming.’ Tom was aware that he was starting to sound as if he were blustering, caught off guard. Which of course he was.
From behind him he heard a small voice: ‘Daddy, what’s going on?’
‘Kelly? Go back in the living room, darling. Daddy’s just having a word with these people.’
She lingered, looking suddenly smaller than usual, and scared. He forced a grin on to his face and gave an encouraging nod, and Kelly disappeared again. Tom turned back to the duo on the doorstep, glaring at the cameraman to make sure he hadn’t taken any pictures of Kelly.
He stepped outside again in his stockinged feet, let the door swing shut behind him. The reporter and the cameraman were forced to take a step back.
‘Look,’ Tom said. ‘I have nothing to deny, or confirm, or whatever, because I’ve never heard of any such allegations before now. I don’t know where you’ve got your information from, but it’s clearly an unreliable source, so I suggest you spend a little more time checking your facts beforehand and a little less time hounding innocent people on their doorsteps first thing in the morning. Now kindly remove yourselves from my property.’
‘Dr Carlyle –’ the woman began. Tom folded his arms.
‘Go. Now.’
‘Just a few questions –’
‘I have nothing to say, and I’ll be lodging a formal complaint about your conduct with your office. Now leave.’
They stayed put, staring at him, defiant. He shrugged.
‘Then I’ll have the police remove you.’
He went back inside and closed the door. By the time he’d reached the living room, ruffled Kelly’s hair reassuringly and picked up the phone, he saw the reporter and the cameraman through the front window, making their way back to a van parked up on the kerb outside. Only when they’d pulled away and the van was out of sight did he put down the phone and let out a long breath.
And it wasn’t until he’d glanced at the clock, shooed Kelly into the hallway to put on her shoes and grabbed his own loafers, jacket and briefcase that it hit him, the physical aftershock of an unexpected and distressing encounter that left his legs slightly weak and his hands shaking.
Had it been some sort of prank? But who’d do such a thing, involving the local press? And what sort of allegation had the Pember Valley News heard that
was robust enough that they saw fit to pursue it, to the point of doorstepping people at seven in the morning?
In a way, Tom was thankful he was running late, because it gave him less time to muse on what had happened. But even as he wrestled with the rush-hour traffic on the way to the nursery, he found his thoughts returning again and again to the encounter.
…You behaved in an inappropriate manner with one of your female patients…
The idea hit him as he was turning into the street where the nursery was located, and it caused him almost to run into the back of a car that was stopped round the corner.
Was it Chloe? Did she make a complaint, after what… happened that evening between us?
It was an absurd notion. They’d been outside the work situation and she wasn’t his patient, she was Ben Okoro’s. Plus, he couldn’t imagine Chloe doing such a thing. It was true that they hadn’t spoken since the encounter nearly a week earlier, but he hadn’t sensed that was because of a brooding animosity towards him on her part. Rather, he assumed she felt as awkward about it as Tom himself did, and was leaving a period of time for them both to cool off before they sought contact again and broached the subject.
But still… Tom couldn’t, for the life of him and in all honesty, imagine who could have brought such an allegation otherwise. As a doctor he was well aware of the dangers of inappropriate conduct towards patients, given the imbalance of power between a suffering individual and the professional he or she had placed their trust in to help and heal them. As a single man in his early thirties, he was even more acutely aware of the potential pitfalls that could arise in his dealings with women patients. It was why he never, ever consulted a female patient without a chaperone present, whether the practice nurse or one of the receptionists or even one of the patient’s own family members. Tom could, with his hand on his heart, assert that his behaviour had been professional at all times.
Misperceptions could, and did, occur, of course. A handshake that was thought to linger too long, a friendly remark that was interpreted out of context... the potential for misinterpretation in human communication was inexhaustible. So it was possible that somebody had misconstrued his behaviour and found it offensive. Fair enough; he was quite prepared to discuss this, and to apologise unreservedly if necessary for any offence cause. But surely this wasn’t the way to go about addressing the grievance - to approach the press, first, before raising the matter with Tom himself, or even with the practice manager?
