In the Still of the Night

by Charlotte Lamb

  The noise brought a nurse hurrying over. ‘What’s all this?’ She smiled at Trudie. ‘Now, don’t be naughty, Gran. Don’t get into one of your little tantrums.’ She looked at Annie and said soothingly, ‘Better go, now. She’ll be quiet once you’ve gone.’

  Annie bit her lip and walked away, fighting with tears. In the corridor she walked into a little bevy of student nurses who immediately surrounded her asking for autographs and firing questions at her about The Force.

  ‘Have you ever shot any scenes in here, in the hospital itself?’

  She shook her head. ‘We did shoot a scene outside, but they wouldn’t give us permission to shoot in the actual hospital.’

  ‘If you ever did, we could be extras!’ a Chinese girl giggled, her hand politely in front of her mouth.

  ‘Less noise, please!’ the ward sister said, coming out to frown at them. ‘We have some very sick old people in this ward – we don’t want to upset them, do we?’

  Annie made her excuses and left. None of the students had asked her why she was there.

  Twenty minutes later, as Jason drew up outside her home, Annie saw Johnny’s car parked just in front of them. Her heart at once seemed to implode as if a giant hand was squeezing it; she could scarcely breathe and yet she was intensely happy.

  Giving Jason a radiant smile, she handed him a £50 note. ‘I’m sorry you missed your fare yesterday, Jason. My fault. Buy Angela something pretty with this.’

  He didn’t argue; the note vanished into his jacket as if sucked in by a vacuum cleaner. His grin broadened his face. ‘You’re an angel, Miss Lang. This’ll make our night. We’re going to a rave, out at Milton Keynes – starting at eleven o’clock; huge, utterly huge, should be magic, especially if I’ve got some cash to spend. Dancing in that sort of crush makes you real thirsty; they sell around a million popsicles.’

  ‘What?’ asked Annie, baffled.

  He laughed. ‘Frozen drinks on a stick; really refreshing. You get hot enough to explode after a while – the bouncers walk around all night squirting the dancers with cold water. The floor’s like a lake by the early hours.’

  ‘Sounds too exhausting for me! Especially if it goes on most of the night!’ said Annie.

  ‘I bet you’d love it!’ Jason hesitated, then said, ‘My mum was real upset about Mr Fenn, she was a fan – and she said to tell you those things the papers printed about you, well, everyone knows they’re liars, nobody is going to believe stuff like that about you.’

  His mother had said to him explosively that she’d like to go down town and burn those newspaper offices to the ground, printing lies about Annie Lang. A person only had to look at her lovely face with those big, innocent eyes, to know it couldn’t be true. Some actresses might go in for that carry-on, she said, but not Annie. She was much too nice.

  Annie smiled at him. ‘Thank your mum for me – I only wish everyone was like her, but there is always someone who’ll believe the worst.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth?’ agreed Jason.

  ‘But give your mum my love, and enjoy your rave.’

  Annie got out and heard Jason drive off smoothly as she unlocked her front door. She switched off the burglar alarm she had set the last time she left the house, and switched on the hall lights.

  Without turning round she heard the firm tread of his feet and closed her eyes, waiting, her pulses wild. The door closed and Johnny’s arms came round her possessively; she leaned back on him for a second then turned with uplifted face, her mouth parting.

  They kissed as if for the first time, and also as if for the last time, with need and hunger and desperation.

  I must be a masochist; I never thought I was, thought Annie, eyes closed, arms round his neck, almost strangling him they held him so tightly. Loving Johnny was a sort of self-torture, it hurt so much and yet even the pain of it pierced her with happiness.

  ‘I can’t lose you,’ Johnny muttered into her open mouth. ‘I would die if I lost you again.’

  ‘Me, too,’ she said. ‘Oh, Johnny, I love you so much it’s killing me. I almost wish I was dead because this would be the right time to die, while I’m so happy. I’ve never really been happy since you vanished like that. I’m scared, Johnny. What if we’re never this happy again in our lives? It would be better to be dead.’

  He drew his head back to look down at her and she saw he had turned pale.

  Then he began kissing her again, even more feverishly.

  Sean had been taking a shower when the phone rang and hadn’t heard it, but when he was dressed again he noticed a light on his answerphone and switched on the playback.

  Harriet’s voice made him stiffen.

  ‘God, can’t anyone do a simple job?’ he muttered, and rang her back at the studio.

  ‘How long ago did she leave?’ he bit out, and Harriet stammered, hearing the rage in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know—’

  He exploded. ‘Christ, Harriet, how could you leave her alone, even for a second? I warned you!’

  ‘I asked her to wait for me. She knew where I was, just in my office, I had to make a couple of very important phone calls – Annie shouldn’t have left without me.’

  ‘Well, she hasn’t got here yet. I’ll ring her at home,’ Sean muttered, and hung up with a crash that made Harriet go deaf for a second.

  She was so angry that she decided to go home herself instead of rushing over to Sean’s flat. Why should she let him bawl at her like that? Who did he think he was?

  But when she was in her car she changed her mind. After all, Annie was Roger Keats’s chief target – if he was somewhere out there in the city, Annie was in danger every second of the day and night.

  Sean drove to Annie’s house so fast that he was lucky not to crash into another car. It was getting dark now, traffic leaving London in the tidal wave that flowed in and out of the capital every morning and evening. Several other drivers hooted viciously as he wove in and out at high speed, but he ignored them, cutting corners, taking short cuts, his tyres screeching.

  She lived in one of the inner suburbs on the north side of London, within walking distance both of Regent’s Park and the big mainline railway stations on that side of London.

  The wide, tree-lined streets had been mostly built in one of the great waves of property development that came every decade or so during the nineteenth century.

  You could guess by the style of housing in a road just when it had been built. Every generation spawned a new style. Annie’s house came from the Edwardian period when large families and a confident middle class demanded space, and even a smaller terrace house had a long garden in front of it, a black and white tiled pathway edged with scalloped red tiles, and a hedge to shield it from the outside world. The row of plane trees planted along the pavement gave the road a sleepy, country air, even now, when the branches were bare.

  Sean parked, jumped out of his Porsche and ran to the golden oak front door. There was no answer to his ringing and knocking. He went to the front windows to peer through the blinds, but could see nothing whatever inside.

  A man across the street working in his garden looked over and called to Sean, ‘If you’re the press, she’s not there. Left ten minutes ago.’

  Sean hurried over there. ‘Was she alone? In a taxi, or …?’

  ‘Are you the police? Or the press?’

  Sean eyed him narrowly. ‘What difference would it make which I was?’

  ‘The press pay for information – the police don’t. My name’s Phil Grover, by the way. What’s yours?’

  Sean’s teeth met. He was inclined to throttle the man, who was a short, skinny, ferret-faced creature, could be in his thirties, might be younger. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, trainers – teenage gear, but he was no teenager.

  ‘Never mind my name, Mr Grover, I prefer to be anonymous.’ Sean pulled out a twenty-pound note and proffered it.

  The other man snorted. ‘Think again, Mr Anonymous.’

  Grimly Se
an found another couple of notes. He had no time to haggle over money with the bastard. Every second counted; he was terrified for Annie.

  Pocketing the notes, the other told him. ‘She left with some guy, in a rather ramshackle old car; not her style at all, I’d have said. She usually comes and goes in a chauffeur-driven limousine – one brought her home this evening, black guy driving it. It’s usually him, I’ve noticed him before. But there was this other car parked in the street, I noticed that, too, because I was suspicious, after all the police activity in the street lately. I was thinking of ringing the police and getting them to come along to take a look at this guy. I mean, he might have been the guy who murdered Derek Fenn. You hear about these crazy fans, don’t you? Look at the guy who shot John Lennon. What do they call them? Stalkers? Well, he looked as if he could be one of them – there was just something about him. He just sat in his car, watching her house. Might have been a reporter, I thought, and I did wonder if I ought to go over and talk to him, but on the other hand … he made me a bit nervous, actually.’

  Good for him, thought Sean, disliking Phil Grover so much he wanted to smash him in the face with a fist.

  He forced himself to keep calm, though; he needed the man’s information.

  ‘Just as I was thinking of ringing the police, though, Miss Lang arrived in her car, and went into the house. The chauffeur drove off and the guy in the old car got out and went into the house too. Miss Lang was expecting him, I’d say, because she left the front door open for him and I saw her waiting in the hall.’

  ‘Waiting for him?’ Sean broke out hoarsely. ‘Sure about that?’

  Phil Grover gave him a sly grin. ‘Thought you’d be interested in that. Yes, she definitely waited for him to join her. He shut the front door as he went in, and then about ten minutes later they both came out. He was carrying a suitcase. He hadn’t had it when he went in. They got in his car and drove off.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you got the number?’

  Phil Grover grinned again. ‘If I did, it would cost you another forty quid.’

  Sean’s hands screwed into fists by his sides; the other man looked down at them with a flicker of nerves, backed a little, then said, ‘Well, do you want the number or don’t you?’

  Sean sat in his car and rang Tom Moor before he drove off; Tom was out and Cherie took the call.

  ‘He’s working on your case,’ she assured him.

  ‘Can you get one of his assistants to check a licence number for me with the police computer?’ Sean read it out. ‘And ring me back as soon as you get the name and address of the driver.’

  ‘Sean, is this case dangerous for my Tom?’ Cherie asked, anxiety in her voice.

  ‘I doubt it, unless he’s very stupid,’ Sean curtly said.

  ‘You know my Tom can be very stupid,’ she groaned. ‘If anything happens to him I’ll never forgive you, Sean.’

  ‘I’d never forgive myself! Tom’s one of my best friends, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ Her voice softened. ‘I still wish he was in some other business. It was bad enough when he was a copper and I never knew when – or if – he was coming home again, but at least there he was backed up by mates. Now he’s out there on his own.’

  ‘That was his choice, Cherie! But don’t underestimate Tom’s sense of self-preservation. Stop worrying, Tom’s a big boy. Look, will you also tell him that Roger Keats has surfaced at last? He rang his ex-wife last night, it seems, and boasted of having killed Derek Fenn. Ask Tom to try all his friends still in the force to see if they’ve come up with any more than that. If they track Keats down, for instance.’

  ‘Tom says Chorley told him to bug off last time he bumped into him down at the nick.’

  ‘Charming. Chorley’s such a nice guy. Well, when Tom does ring you, ask him to give me a ring, would you? Bye, Cherie, love to the kids.’

  Sean rang off and stood at the window, his fists pushed into his denim jacket pockets. While he was talking to Cherie, he had kept his thoughts at bay, but now they came back like a tidal wave, swamping him.

  Where in God’s name was Annie? Sweat started out on his forehead and in the palms of his hands.

  He didn’t want to know what she was doing. He could guess. Unfortunately. That was what was grinding in the pit of his stomach like a surgeon’s knife, the images of what he suspected she was doing – jealousy was the cruellest emotion you could ever feel, but he could live with that. If he had to. He had learnt long ago to accept what he could not alter.

  A policeman learnt to discipline his imagination – to deal just with facts and evidence and never let himself think about the pain and suffering he sees. The world was a pretty nasty place in some corners of it. Sean had thought himself totally cauterised against emotions.

  He hadn’t reckoned with his own. For one particular woman. Annie had got under his skin, into his bloodstream – day by day she had come to mean more to him than he had ever thought any woman could.

  He liked women, but had only twice come close to a serious relationship – one when he was in his late teens, with a girl from his school who went off to university and dropped him within weeks when he became a police cadet. She wrote explaining that she wasn’t dating a policeman, thanks! He gathered he was no longer good enough for her. Policemen were the wrong income group. The last he heard she had married a stockbroker and was living in Pinner. He hadn’t cried over her, he’d been too furious. Later he’d started dating a secretary who worked in the same police station; they’d seen each other for several years until she went to a police union conference, got drunk and spent the night in a wild orgy with a number of other delegates. It hadn’t taken twenty-four hours for the news to reach Sean; the whole station was buzzing about it before she even reappeared at work. That had been the end of that relationship – not so much because he was jealous, or angry, as because he could no longer trust her. He no longer liked her, either. He felt a fool for having been so wrong about her.

  It had left him cynical, disillusioned, inclined never to take women on face value, and what he had learnt about Annie over the past days had reinforced his cynicism, but he didn’t care about any of the secrets from her past that he had uncovered. He could forgive her anything … so long as she was safe, but his mind was possessed with dread, afraid that the next time he saw her she would be lying on a mortuary slab.

  Annie and Johnny stopped on the way to the forest to buy a take-away meal, Greek kebabs and pitta bread and rice which she re-heated in the kitchen oven for a couple of minutes while Johnny was lighting the fire in the shabby drawing-room. They drew the curtains to shut out the forest and lit candles to give the room a shimmering glamour it did not have by the harsher reality of electric light.

  Since Johnny had got out of prison he had visited the house a number of times, he told her, to take the covers off the furniture, have the electricity switched back on, heat up the house with electric fires and log fires to get rid of the faint dampness and smell of mould which years of emptiness had build up. His lawyers had had a woman come in once a month to clean the place and had paid any bills for rates and water. There had been just enough money from his grandmother’s insurance policy to pay for that.

  They ate from one large plate, using the slit pitta bread to hold their food; Annie had mixed salad with the meat before she filled the hot pittas. The food seemed ambrosial; she had never tasted anything so good.

  Johnny put Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number I on the old gramophone; the romantic music and the candles and the firelight took them to a dimension where only they existed and there was no world outside.

  She had forgotten Sean and Harriet completely; it never occurred to her to ring and explain where she had gone. When she was with Johnny nothing else mattered.

  After they had eaten they drank coffee and Johnny lay with his head in her lap while she stroked his thick black hair and watched him. This time they did not feel a deep urge to make love at first, although they
couldn’t stop touching each other, as if needing the reassurance of touch to believe that they were really together again. He gazed into the flames, listening to the music, and she simply looked at him, drinking him in through her eyes. Every so often he would catch her wrist and pull her hand down to his mouth, kiss her palm.

  ‘Oh, Annie, God knows how many times I’ve dreamt of being back here with you when I was in prison. At night when we were locked up in our cells I’d lie on my bunk and stare at this tiny square in the wall that was my only view of the sky; sometimes you could see a star or two, or even the moon, although the prison wall was ringed with electric lights that reflected back from the clouds and made it hard to see anything else. I’d blank it all out, imagine this room, and you. It kept me sane. They let me have headphones and a personal cassette player. I had a tape of this music, and played it all the time because we’d liked to listen to it together, remember?’

  ‘I remember.’ Lying there, he looked so much like the boy she had known. She had waited for him all these years. Only now did she realise that she had turned her back on any other possible happiness because she secretly believed that one day he would come back to her.

  And he had. No wonder it was easy to tell herself that nothing had changed between them, their love was exactly the same. At first it had seemed true.

  But she was starting to doubt it. How could they both be the same?

  No matter how you tried, you could not stay unchanged for years. Even for a short time, come to that. Life wouldn’t let you.

  She was not the shy eighteen-year-old who had known Johnny eight years ago. He was not that gentle, eager boy. She wasn’t sure what changes time had made in her – but she could see some of the differences in Johnny, the visible ones, anyway. She smoothed out with her fingertips some of the lines etched into his brow and he closed his eyes, sighing.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘You didn’t have any lines there, eight years ago,’ she thought aloud.

  He laughed. ‘Maybe you just don’t remember them.’

  ‘I remember everything,’ she said, and he smiled again.