That was when she saw the first flash of anger. ‘She used to say how she thought he were good lookin’. I took no notice. Just a fancy, I suppose.’ He rose in his chair. Angry now. ‘She’s just been making a bloody monkey out of me. I’m a laughing stock. No wonder I have a beer or two. Heather? She’s not right in the head.’
‘When she’s pregnant,’ she reminded him, following on with a question. ‘Only when she’s pregnant?’
He nodded.
‘So … Why?’ She let the question linger in the air.
Geoff leaned in even further. In confidence. ‘It’s to get back at me,’ he said. ‘To punish me.’
‘For what?’
His mouth clamped shut.
She waited. People are like this. They bury secrets and all you see is the tip of the molehill pushing up through the earth, giving a hint of the network of tunnels underneath.
He eyed her for a moment without responding. Then his mouth started moving very slightly as though beginning to form words. In his eyes, there was no clue as to what this response would be. Finally he found an answer. ‘Maybe it’s because I find it hard to stick to a job. I don’t have no qualifications, you know, Doctor.’ He grinned, exposing more of his crooked teeth. ‘Not like you. And I find it hard to go in day after day. They’ve said I have Tourette’s.’
‘Who said you have Tourette’s?’
‘Me old doctor.’
‘Not a psychiatrist? You didn’t have a formal assessment? Answer a questionnaire?’
‘No. Nothing so formal.’ His tongue moistened his lips before he managed, ‘But sometimes … Occasionally,’ he substituted, ‘I have the odd day when I’m just not myself.’
What a useful phrase.
‘Find it hard to get up in the mornin’. That’s why,’ he finished triumphantly, ‘she goes a bit queer when she’s pregnant,’ he said, batting away the explanation with a waft of his hand. ‘Worry. That’s why she starts saying daft things. Inventin’ stuff. Imaginin’ things. Goin’ a bit loopy.’ He accompanied the word with a circular finger motion on his temple. It was a gesture Claire hadn’t seen since she was a schoolgirl. His left eye twitched, which he tried to restrain with his middle finger. ‘Sorry,’ he said, rocking ever so slightly in the chair. ‘She gets these ideas, you know.’ He tried to laugh it off. ‘Says they’re not mine, that they’re some other fellows’.’
Claire moved on. ‘As Eliza wasn’t your daughter, did you have trouble bonding with her?’
‘No,’ he protested. ‘She were a nice little thing. I loved her like me own. But we lost her.’
There was no grief contained in the sentence. Claire simply nodded, gauging the situation. Just as things had felt wrong when she had interviewed Heather and her sister so this, also, felt strange.
He seemed to think he should add something. ‘Couldn’t believe it,’ he said – no rancour. ‘Two kids. Lovely little things.’ He moved in to share a confidence. ‘Cost her her sanity, it did, being pregnant. And then they go and die on her.’
There was no self-pity, no breast-beating, no grief or sorrow or any of the other emotions considered normal in this situation. Just words. Plain and simple. And genuine. They could have held more pathos but Geoff Krimble appeared to have accepted his own version of events.
‘I don’t mean to be funny or sorry for myself,’ he continued, ‘but people should realize it was my tragedy as much as hers. I’d looked after Eliza like one of me own. And I didn’t take comfort by bleating on about Eliza and Freddie. They didn’t suffer. They just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They just weren’t there any more. End of.’ His eyes were challenging her now.
She narrowed her eyes. Was this man-speak? ‘When did you first realize something was wrong with Heather?’
He frowned, shaking his head in confusion. ‘Dunno.’
‘When did she first begin to have delusions?’
His answer was a frown. ‘Ever?’
‘Yes. When you first met her, what sort of a person did you think she was?’
The question foxed him. He swallowed, leaned back, appeared to be deep in thought. It was only surface deep. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Quiet.’ He frowned. ‘Deep.’
All that thought and that was the best he could come up with?
She tried again. ‘What did you like about her that made you want to marry her even though she was pregnant with another man’s child?’
Again, this provoked puzzlement. Please, she thought, don’t give me ‘Dunno’ again.
‘She were different,’ he said finally. ‘There was somethin’ almost mysterious about her.’ His eyes focused on the wall behind her. ‘Maybe that was part of it. The secrets,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t make her out.’ He shifted his gaze. ‘Intriguing,’ he said, frowning, as though finding the word had been an effort.
She persisted. ‘When did she begin to imagine things?’
‘When she were pregnant with Eliza. About halfway through. Not long after we were married.’
‘How did it manifest itself?’
‘Sorry?’ The word had baffled him.
‘What did she imagine?’
He gave an almighty twitch and again she caught the unmistakable waft of beer, as though a pub door had opened. ‘Stuff about the baby being evil, stuff that it was cursed. Her dad said she was goin’ through a bad time and it would help. It would really help if we was married. Up until then she’d been sort of ordinary. Nice. Quiet. Obedient.’
Claire winced at the word.
‘But there was always something out of reach. You know.’
Claire nodded. She was beginning to have a picture. Not a nice one, of a woman, bullied as a child, glued to her sister by circumstances, married to someone who could not fathom her depths so swiped her.
‘Do you find her claims strange, out of character?’
He nodded. ‘The real Heather wouldn’t say boo to a goose let alone go off with some bloke. Before we was married we didn’t even …’ A sweaty flush crept up his neck, reaching his forehead in a breakout of sweat.
‘And her attitude to sex after you were married?’
That was when Geoff Krimble started bouncing his feet around, tapping a nervous dance, patently uncomfortable with the subject of sex.
‘I can’t say she liked it much.’
‘But you don’t think Mr Cartwright was Eliza’s father?’
‘I don’t think so. After she’d got over the birth and left the firm she never mentioned him again.’ He spoke with smug satisfaction. ‘So … that proves it, don’t it?’
‘And Freddie?’
‘Hah.’ Geoff spluttered his mirth. ‘That was even more bloody silly. Window cleaner. He never even came inside. Shagged her through glass, did he?’ Veins bulged in his neck, giving him the look of an angry bull. ‘Or in the garden when we’re overlooked on three sides and the neighbours are nosey old buggers.’ He forced accompanying laughter for a few seconds before sobering up.
‘You discussed all this with Doctor Hodgkins?’
He nodded. ‘She were helpful but Doctor Sylas said she’s off sick at the moment so we can’t be seeing her this time.’ The phrase seemed to hold threat of further pregnancies, further allegations reaching for the horizon as well as the tacit implication, So we’re stuck with you.
Claire felt almost exultant. This interview seemed, on the surface at least, promising – at least for Charles Tissot. On Geoff’s evidence alone, Heather’s allegation appeared to be yet another tale from an unbalanced mind. But while Cartwright and Sam Maddox had been men she’d already known for some time, the encounter between her and Charles had been a single brushing encounter at a crowded party. It was different. And it did fit in with Charles’s hunting habits.
She tried to explore this aspect. ‘Is there anything different about this pregnancy?’
‘Same old,’ he said, again wafting the question away with a limp wrist and spread fingers.
‘But they only met at that one party? She di
dn’t know Mr Tissot before?’
He shook his head. ‘Normally Ruth and Heather would just go out for a curry or something, you know, Indian places. I’m not keen on curry, see. And to be honest I’m not over-keen on Ruth. She’s a bit a snob, you know, and doesn’t approve of me.’ He spoke the words with an accompanying eye-roll. ‘Heather’s a shy bird. Not a great mixer.’
‘So when she told you that Mr Tissot was the father of her baby, how did you react?’
‘Gave her a spank.’ He leered. ‘Just a little one. Told her not to be so stupid.’
If only it was as simple as this. A little spank and told her not to be so stupid.
She sat very still. So, then, one of her theories had just been admitted. If a man admits to his wife’s psychiatrist that he had given his wife a little spank you can be sure that there is something much more sinister going on behind closed doors. ‘It’s the same old thing,’ he said, bored now. ‘She’s spinning the same old stories.’
‘You’re saying, then, that the child is yours and not Mr Tissot’s?’
He gave her a sharp look. ‘’Course it bloody well is mine. Who else’s would it be?’
‘So you and your wife have regular sex?’
He nodded.
It had been a long interview. She felt this was the end of the road as far as Geoff Krimble went. She had got as far with him as was possible. She didn’t arrange to see him again.
Sometimes the mistakes we make are the mistakes of omission. There was one word she should have picked up on.
NINETEEN
Thursday, 2 July, 8.50 a.m.
Her next plan was to speak to Simon Bracknell, to see if Laura Hodgkins’ previous notes could firm up her diagnosis. Puerperal psychosis plus de Clerambault’s syndrome. It would be interesting to write up in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. She had plenty of other avenues to explore but first she needed to understand a little more of Heather’s past. The next best thing to speaking to Laura would be to read her notes.
But, as often happens, in psychiatry, as in life, events took a sideways swipe. In many ways, it was her fault. It began when she decided to follow up another previous idea, have a conversation face-to-face with Charles. She knew exactly what she was up to. She wanted to convince herself of his complete and utter innocence. So she rang.
He sounded abrupt and vaguely hostile when she invited him to her office – at a time of his own choosing.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ he said, patently in a bad temper over something. ‘Let’s go to a wine bar, make the chat informal. At least do that for me.’
As always, he was quickly dominating the encounter, drawing up his own battle lines and ignoring hers.
‘OK,’ she said reluctantly, already uncomfortable at his Alpha male position. But she agreed to it with only the faintest hint of discomfort and the proviso that she would make it early in the evening. They fixed on Saturday night at The Orange Tree, an up-and-coming pub along the A34 in Newcastle-under-Lyme. ‘I’m not meeting in Hanley,’ she said, slightly petulant at having been manoeuvred into being there in the first place. ‘I got a bloody parking ticket the last time I parked there.’
Needless to say, Charles was totally unsympathetic. ‘You should have fed the machine, Claire.’
‘I would have done,’ she retorted, ‘if I could have made head or tail of the parking charges. They were the most ambiguous I’ve ever seen. Anyway, it puts Hanley out of bounds for me now.’
He chuckled, obviously delighted to be scoring points over her and, for the first time since he’d first made contact, she wondered what he was like now. Still preppy? Still humourless? Cocky and conceited? Predatory? Or had he settled down into a typical consultant, abiding by the rules, breaking none, behaving himself, putting on weight and playing golf?
His ex-wife would doubtless have plenty to say on the subject. But she had yet to make her acquaintance. She had tried to get hold of Rhoda on a couple of occasions, only to be told that she was away on a course with the exciting title: Pain Management in a Prolonged First Stage of Labour. It was being held in Scarborough and Mrs Tissot was not expected back until Monday at the earliest, so for that pleasure she would have to wait. And it further delayed Heather’s admission. Claire couldn’t risk admitting her to Greatbach without suitable obstetric care, but neither did she want to discuss such a complex case with the second-in-command. She wanted Rhoda, whose reputation was deservedly formidable. For competence.
Saturday, 4 July, 6 p.m.
The Orange Tree, Newcastle-under-Lyme.
The Orange Tree was one of those pubs which had, in the last couple of years, spruced itself up and suddenly become a gastropub with arguably some of the best food in the Potteries. Even though it was on the busy A34 south of Newcastle and parking could be a bit of a squeeze and forbidden in the nearby streets, it had become one of ‘the’ places to meet, dine and socialize.
Although Claire considered the evening an extension of work and her ‘date’ was with Charles, it had been nice to start getting ready for an evening out. Radio on, long bath, deciding what to wear … in this case smart black trousers, high-heeled boots and a multicoloured silk shirt. Make-up, perfume. Done. Time to meet the man. As she drove along the A500, leaving it to join the A34, she wondered. What was the real origin of Heather Krimble’s potentially damaging allegations? Simply a deluded, sick mind or was there some substance behind them? A look, a flirtation, a compliment, a grope? What had happened at that party to set her mind on such a track?
The evening was warm enough for her to sit outside and she was early. Obsessional time-keeping was one of her private curses – she was invariably early for appointments, usually arriving well before time, on one occasion in danger of catching the train before her booked ticket. She sat outside in the beer garden, overlooking the car park, sitting under the shade and watching cars cruise through, searching for a space, seeing people come and go, greet each other, smoke, drink, eat, laugh. Like many people sitting alone with just a white wine spritzer for company, she fiddled with her phone, sending out the message that she might be alone at the moment but she had lots, hoards, queues, piles … of friends. She texted a few of them, including Adam, her half-brother, pleased at the way their relationship had thawed, acknowledging that it was partly, at least, due to his new girlfriend, Adele. Adele the peacemaker. Adele the forgiver. Adele who did not probe into an uncomfortable, dangerous past but looked forward to a pleasant, friendly future with her fiancée’s half-sister.
She looked up from a friendly returned text – Hi Claire, nice to hear from you. Yes, let’s meet up again – soon? A XXX – to see a maroon Jaguar slide in next to a Peugeot and Charles climb out, instantly recognizable. He was a large man, over six feet tall and these days burly rather than slim. Even as his eyes scanned the courtyard he oozed confidence, seeming to look down his nose at the patrons of The Orange Tree. Claire reflected that he hardly looked like a man whose career could, potentially, be about to swirl right down the plughole. She rose to meet him and he crossed the courtyard quickly, kissing her on both cheeks with the comment, ‘Gosh, Claire, I don’t know what you’re on but you haven’t changed a bit.’
What was the correct response to this particular cliché?
Coyness, honesty? Obviously she’d bloody well changed in fifteen years. She ignored the comment, instead studying him back. She might have changed but not as much as he. Her eyes exposed dissolution blooming in his face, weight, puffiness, worry.
Oh, Charles, your lifestyle is catching up with you.
‘Drink?’ He disappeared off to the bar for ten minutes, returning with a wine glass in one hand and a beer in the other, a big, confident grin almost splitting his face. Large, square, rugby-player’s shoulders. Powerful thighs bulging through his trousers. Some things never change. He set the drinks down on the table and sat down heavily opposite her. Then he took a long draft of his beer, eyes warily observant over the rim of his glass, before saying mournfu
lly – and insincerely, ‘Oh, Claire, why didn’t we make a go of it?’
Again, how does one respond to this clichéd set piece, so patently a play-act? Truthfully?
Because it was never on the cards. Never on offer. Because … All the reasons why romances never get off the ground.
He looked the same as ever but more so. More confident, more preppy, teeth whiter, physique heavier, but softer than when he had played for the varsity rugby elevens. In a cream open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and navy chinos, he emitted an air of confidence and the unmistakable scent of success. God, she thought, he is so sure of himself.
‘Well,’ he said, grinning and taking another slurp of beer. ‘This is nice. Pity about the excuse for meeting up again but it really is great to see you, Claire.’ His hand stole from the beer glass to touch hers. It was still chilly from the drink. ‘Great to find an excuse to catch up.’ He couldn’t resist tucking a compliment in but as he had so obviously used it a thousand times it was worthless. ‘You look fantastic.’ The usual bit of bullshit followed. ‘If I’d known how gorgeous you were going to turn out I wouldn’t have got myself in a pickle with bloody Rhoda.’
He’d handed her the cue and a comfortable introduction. ‘So tell me about …’ she managed a smile, ‘… bloody Rhoda. What happened there?’
He leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. ‘Bloody Rhoda,’ he said, ‘ensnared me. I fell into her trap mainly because I was a bit bruised after a previous relationship had, well, um, you know, gone the way of …’
She didn’t know but she could guess. He’d cheated on her. It fitted in so well with all she knew about him.
He continued still with the same aggrieved air. ‘Lovely girl, she was. Lawyer in London. Absolutely refused to come and live up north.’ He looked at her mournfully. ‘I had it all planned out, Claire. Nice big house, great job. Marriage and a family, but when I suggested it she turned me down flat. Said that was not in her plans. Accused me of all sorts of stuff. Shit,’ he said, suddenly explosive, ‘I’d even bought the frigging ring.’
The Deceiver Page 15
