The Vanishing Point

by Val McDermid

  In fairness to Scarlett, she wasn’t holding out on me. She’d only had the news confirmed the night before. She wasn’t ready to share with anyone yet. She certainly wasn’t ready for the whole bloody world to know she’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  The headlines screamed the story. SCARLETT’S DEATH SENTENCE. TV STAR HAS ONLY WEEKS TO LIVE. I’d only gone into Costa Coffee for a quick latte, but instead I’d been hit with the worst possible news.

  I wanted to snatch the copy of the Daily Herald out of the hands of the plaster-stained workman reading it. But good sense prevailed and I ran out of the coffee shop and down the street to the nearest newsagent. I grabbed a copy off the shelf and threw a pound coin on the counter, not waiting for change.

  I stood there on the street, the sun shining as if it had something to celebrate, and read the terrible news.

  TV show host Scarlett Higgins has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The former Goldfish Bowl star has been told she has only weeks to live.

  Last year, Scarlett was treated for breast cancer. After undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, she was given the all-clear.

  But doctors have revealed her body is riddled with secondary cancers which have invaded vital organs and her spine. The cancer is inoperable.

  One of her medical team said, ‘I’m afraid the news is as bad as it gets. The tests have confirmed our worst fears.’

  Scarlett was not available for comment last night. Her agent, George Lyall, said, ‘This is devastating news. I would ask that you respect Scarlett’s privacy while she comes to terms with it.’

  Only last year, tragic Scarlett’s ex-husband, DJ Joshu, died from a drug overdose. Cont p3–4.

  The rest of the article was a rehash of Scarlett’s background and career, lavish with pics of Scarlett with Joshu, Scarlett with Jimmy, Scarlett (or possibly Leanne) falling out of a limo, Scarlett with shaved head and swimsuit promoting her charity swimathon for Timonescu. My eyes scanned the article, but nothing was really sinking in. I was appalled, numbed, shattered by the news.

  I closed the paper and walked the short distance home. It was as if I had forgotten how to walk. Every step of the way needed concentration, like when I’d had to learn how to walk properly again after the accident.

  I don’t remember how I got there, but I seemed to come to on the doorstep, fumbling the key into the lock. I wasn’t sure what to do when I got inside. My first instinct was to call Scarlett, but I didn’t know if that was a good idea in my present state. I felt dazed and stupefied, unable to make the right connections in my head. Instead, I called George. He always knew what to do.

  I had to hold for a couple of minutes. I barely noticed. And then his rich chocolate voice was on the line. I’d never noticed before how very comforting his voice is. But then, I’d never needed comfort from him before. ‘Stephanie, my dear. You’ve heard the terrible news, I take it?’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Lamentably true, I’m afraid. I’m so sorry, Stephanie. I know how fond you are of her. And she of you. We’ve no idea how the media got hold of it. Someone at the clinic must have leaked.’

  ‘Some greedy selfish pig,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was having back pain—’

  ‘I remember, at her birthday party last month. She was complaining about it.’

  ‘That’s right. Her osteopath couldn’t resolve it and she was concerned enough to suggest Scarlett consult a doctor. The only doctor she knows enough to trust is Simon Graham, so she went to see him. And because cancer is always Simon’s first thought, he gave her an MRI. And the shocking truth was there to see.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘And when was this?’

  ‘A couple of days ago. Simon’s very thorough and he insisted that she not panic until he’d carried out further tests. The results came through yesterday afternoon and he tried to call her. She wasn’t answering her phone because she was on set. So he left a voicemail confirming that what they had feared was indeed the case.’

  ‘That sounds suspiciously like the quote in the paper.’

  ‘That’s what Scarlett said too. She’s convinced someone hacked her voicemail. But I think it’s more likely that a nurse or technician overheard Simon leave the message and got on the blower to some hack at the Herald. These people sicken me,’ he said, sounding thoroughly disgusted. ‘They know no boundaries of taste or decency. The woman has a child, for God’s sake.’

  His anger was shielding his sorrow. It’s the only way men like George know how to express their pain. I was pretty sure George was as distraught as I was. How much worse must it have been for Scarlett? She’d fought through so much, but this was one battle she couldn’t win. ‘How is she? Or is that a stupid question?’

  ‘Still stunned, I think. Is there any possibility you might get over there? I really think she ought to have someone with her who cares about her. I’m stuck here holding the fort. But if you could . . . ’

  ‘That was my first thought. But I wanted to check with you. I wondered if maybe she wanted to be left alone with Jimmy.’

  George made a strange, choking sound, like a man struggling with his composure in the face of tears. ‘Stephanie, if I was attempting to deal with what Scarlett has on her plate at present, I would want my best friend by my side. You know she won’t ask. But she would be much better off with you there. Please, if you can, go to her.’

  I didn’t need telling twice. I wasn’t sure whether I was fit to drive; I kept breaking down in tears and having to pull over on to the hard shoulder. Even so, driving would be a lot quicker than trains and cabs. And it would provoke less curiosity. Nothing attracts attention like sobbing on public transport. I really didn’t feel up to dealing with the kindness of strangers. As it was, I had to convince one traffic cop that I wasn’t having some sort of nervous breakdown.

  Of course, when I got to the hacienda, it was even more of a media brawl than when Joshu died. Scarlett had a much higher national profile than her ex-husband and they all wanted a piece of her tragedy. There was something profoundly disgusting about their display. The hunger, the lack of compassion, the blatant parasitism of their desire to feed off Scarlett’s suffering: it all made me feel tainted by my own tangential connection to their world. The only real difference between us was that I operated by consent. I drew a line that respected what my subjects wanted to keep private. But we were all in the business of satisfying an appetite that was rooted in prurience. As I inched my car forward through the press of press, I wondered whether I needed to reconsider how I earn my living.

  For a moment it seemed they were actually going to try to follow me into the courtyard, but good sense prevailed and they didn’t spill in behind me. When I got out of the car I could still hear them baying their questions in my wake. Horrible.

  The kitchen was empty and the house had the feel of a place where nobody’s home. At this time of day, Jimmy would be at nursery, but Marina should be around somewhere, doing housekeeper things. ‘Hello?’ I called. My voice echoed back at me. No signs of life in the living room or in the guest rooms. I carried on to what I always thought of as the leisure club, wondering if I’d find Scarlett in the pool, relentlessly swimming lengths in spite of her pain. But she wasn’t there either.

  The gym was empty too. But when I peeped through the window in the sauna door, there she was, hunched naked on the top bench, her head in her hands. I stepped back before she could sense my presence and went through to the changing room. I undressed quickly. My hand was halfway to a swimsuit when I thought, Fuck it. Meet her on her own terms for once.

  Scarlett barely looked up when I walked in. When she took in my nakedness, she gave a tired little smile and said, ‘Fucking hell, it must be bad if this is how you show you’re on my side.’ Her eyes were puffy and swollen, and she looked as if she’d lost weight.

  I climbed up beside her and put my arm around her. Thank God it wasn’t too hot in there for once. It felt strange to be naked with anoth
er woman, but only because I’m a bit shy about my body, especially when I compare it to an impressive specimen like Scarlett. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, aware of how inadequate the words were. ‘I’d take the bullet for you if I could.’

  ‘I’d let you, an’ all.’ She groaned. ‘It’s Jimmy I feel for. First he loses his dad and now he’s going to lose his mum.’

  ‘It’s not a done deal, surely? There must be some treatment they can try?’

  ‘Simon came round first thing,’ she said. ‘He’d have been here last night instead of relying on a voicemail, only one of his patients was dying and he needed to be there.’ She sighed. ‘It’s inoperable. I’m riddled with it, Steph. It’s in my liver, my pancreas, my colon, my spine, my lungs. I’m a fucking walking cancer. They can give me chemo, but that’s not going to give me more than a few months, and it’ll be a few months of feeling like shit. You remember how it was before.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘No chemo. Just pain relief. That way, at least I get a bit of time with Jimmy where I’m not throwing up or feeling too tired to be arsed with him. And I don’t have to be in hospital either. I can stay here in my own home till the end. Simon’s promised me that. I’ll have to go into the clinic for check-ups a couple of times, but that’s all.’ She made it sound as insignificant as a trip to the supermarket. Her stoicism amazed me.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ I said.

  She tilted her head back, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘None of it’s what I want,’ she shouted. ‘I want a life. I want to see my boy grow up. I don’t want to die.’ Her voice cracked and so did her fortitude. Tears trickled out from her clenched eyelids and her lips curled back in a rictus of anguish. I put my hand on her head and pulled her into my arms. I could feel myself choking up, and before long I was crying silently with her.

  We stayed in the sauna for a while, sobbing and sweating and generally being maudlin and miserable. With good reason, it must be said. ‘Where’s Marina?’ I eventually asked.

  ‘I told her to take Jimmy off somewhere for a few days. Euro Disney or something. Just till the fuss dies down a bit. I need to get myself together. I don’t want him to see me in bits. Or to have those fuckers outside snapping him every time he goes out the gate.’ She shook her head. ‘How the fuck did they find out so fast? They must have hacked my voicemail, it’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘You think? Surely it’s more likely that someone from the clinic leaked it.’

  ‘They’d have known a lot more, though,’ Scarlett said. It was a good point, one that I hadn’t considered. ‘I hate that I don’t even have control over my own terminal bloody illness. I wanted to have a little bit of dignity about the whole thing.

  Not this bloody circus. I can’t help thinking those fuckers created the stress that made me ill in the first place. Vultures. Can’t wait to cash in.’ She managed another tired smile. ‘If anybody’s going to make a bob or two out of me dying, it should be me, not some bloody hack or some Judas that works for Simon.’

  It might sound strange that Scarlett was thinking about the cash implications of her announcement. But at that point, I thought I understood where she was coming from. Scarlett’s working capital was her fame. Now it had a strictly limited shelf life. The swimathon might outlive her. But her fragrances and her endorsements would likely die with her. Unlike authors and musicians whose work carries on earning after their death, a celebrity’s earning power dies with them. And Scarlett had a child she needed to provide for, as well as a charitable foundation whose work she presumably wanted to maintain. Of course she had half an eye on the bottom line.

  She leaned into me. ‘Are you up for another book? The last will and testament? The diary of a dignified death? It would be a bit classier than another pile of celebrity bollocks. Every - body’s talking about going to Switzerland to that Dignitas place, whether we should be allowed to choose how we die. We could do a book about how I manage it.’ Her enthusiasm might have seemed bizarre to an outsider. But to us it made perfect sense.

  ‘Why not? If Biba wants it, we’ll give it to her.’

  When we couldn’t stand the heat any longer, we moved to the pool. Scarlett lowered herself gingerly into the water. Already I could see the changes in the way she moved – normally she launched herself at the water in a running dive and broke the surface with a powerful overarm stroke. But today, a slow breast stroke was all she was up for. She seemed to be ageing in front of my eyes.

  And that was only the start of it. Her decline was frightening. The weight seemed to fall off her. By the time Jimmy and Marina came back a few days later, I reckoned she’d already lost half a stone. She had no interest in food. ‘It all tastes grey,’ she said. And when she could bring herself to eat, she couldn’t keep it down for long.

  Leanne turned up the day after the news broke. I looked at her with new eyes thanks to Scarlett’s revelations, but there seemed to be nothing artificial about her grief. That first night, after Scarlett had gone to bed, we sat up late in the kitchen, drinking brandy and railing against the injustice of it all. When we ran out of rant, I asked her how it was going in Spain. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘The weather’s lovely and the people are friendly. It’s quite nice to go to a place where nobody’s made their mind up about you before you get there. It’s like a clean slate.’

  ‘I think we all fancy that sometimes. Ditch the past and start from scratch.’

  ‘What? Even you, Steph? With your lovely life?’

  I stuck my tongue out at her. ‘Even me. It’s not all loveliness. Remember all that hassle with Pete?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s history now.’

  I thought back to Joshu’s funeral. ‘I think so. I hope so. And business? How’s that working out?’

  Her smile was so open I couldn’t believe it was anything other than the whole truth. ‘Pretty good, actually. I’m starting to build up a nice little clientele. There wasn’t any real competition. Before I set up, you had to go down Fuengirola or Benalmadena to get your nails done by somebody English. And let’s face it, they all prefer somebody English. Bunch of racists, most of them. They act like the Spanish are trained monkeys.’ She chuckled. ‘Mind you, there’s a lot of the Spanish play up to that. They’ve got the Manuel act off to a T.’

  I was glad to see Leanne back at the hacienda. She had a sense of fun and she lightened the atmosphere. And if I’m honest, I was glad to have someone to share Scarlett’s final journey with. It would have been a heavy burden to carry alone.

  Leanne wasn’t the only one picking up a share of the weight. The only doctor Scarlett wanted near her was Simon Graham. She trusted him, she said. And she needed someone medical that she could trust now the end was getting near. She insisted he take a leave of absence from the clinic, and he more or less went along with her demands. He generally went in to the clinic for a couple of hours in the late morning two or three times a week. But other than that, he was at the hacienda. He moved a single bed into her dressing room and spent the nights there, in case she needed help. She didn’t want a stranger nursing her either. So Marina added nurse to her list of household jobs whenever Simon needed a hand.

  Simon and Marina became part of the late-night kitchen set. It was an odd group, brought together for the saddest of reasons. We started playing poker to pass the time and often we’d play for hours, trying to take our minds off the dying woman and the sleeping child upstairs. Simon bought a set of proper poker chips and we sat around the table trying to figure each other out. I’d learned to play poker with Pete and his musician buddies, and I’d found it an interesting way to gain an insight into people’s personalities. Simon always took his time, weighing the odds (he claimed), before finally betting conservatively. Of all of us, he made the best decisions about when to fold. A man who would always cut his losses and come out even.

  Leanne was more reckless, often playing no-hope hands down to the bitter end because she couldn’t bear to be too far fr
om the action. I could generally tell when she had something worth betting because she would shut up and follow the field. When she went out on a limb, I knew she had nothing worth a damn.

  Marina was hardest to read. There was no tell when she looked at her cards. She always hung back on the first round but then there was no pattern to how she bet. As a result, she generally managed to out-bluff the rest of us. If we’d been playing for money instead of ceramic chips, she’d have fleeced us all.

  Me, I bet my hand. I always bet my hand and I suspect that makes me pretty easy to read. I don’t think my face gives me away; it’s my inability to bet counter to the cards I’m looking at in my hand and on the table. I’m not good at bluffing – or lying, as I like to think of it.

  Most mornings, I spent an hour or two with Scarlett in her bedroom that smelled of Scarlett Smile and antiseptic. Those were the gentlest interviews I’ve ever done. I’d suggest an avenue to explore and she’d talk for as long as she had strength. We covered all sorts of things – motherhood from both sides, coping with losing a parent, the double grief of her marriage ending followed by Joshu’s death, putting her house in order for her own death. She shied away from nothing, openly talking of mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities. She did tire easily but she wasn’t losing weight so rapidly now and she assured me that Simon was keeping her pain-free. ‘It’s bloody lovely, that bit of it,’ she said. ‘Morphine just makes me float. Only drug I ever took to.’

  One morning, as I settled myself in the chair and laid out my recorder and notebook, she pointed to the machine. ‘Leave that off a minute,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you woman to woman. Not for publication.’

  Wondering what was coming, I nodded. ‘No problem. What’s on your mind?’