by Brett Adams
“I know you don’t feel well.,” I said. “The wine is probably poisoned, too.”
“Are you just going to watch me drink, Jack?”
Was this death by Observation? I was supposed to watch Jane die?
She sighed, then gripped the cork in her teeth and tugged it. It came free with a ploonk, and she filled the glasses to the brim with a velvety red vintage.
“Poisoned?” She sighed. “Yeah, probably, so I guess you’d better not drink it. But just pretend for a moment, will you?”
I glanced at my Medline. It was after one o’clock. Where in hell was this doctor?
From the corner of my eye I saw Jane raise the glass to her lips. I reached to restrain her arm, and she stared at me.
“Give me just one moment of pleasure, Jack. Take a look where we are. Take a proper look, and give me a damn moment’s normality.”
What did she mean? I scanned the waiting room. What did she expect me to see? Coffee tables, magazines, tired chairs, a fish tank containing a solitary catatonic goldfish. On a board, behind the receptionist, the practitioners were listed. I read the names.
Finally, noticed the pattern.
“Oncology,” I said.
“Got it in one,” she said, and raised her glass.
“Cancer?”
“Terminal. Your pet dickhead, Hero, wasted some fine chocolate and wine shooting a carcass.” She set the glass to her lips, and closed her eyes.
Part of my mind rejoiced to discover yet another proof of Hiero’s narrative fallibility.
But—
My arm whipped out, knocking the glass from her hand. It flew through the air trailing a streamer of blood-red wine, and shattered against a magazine rack.
With a sigh, Jane mimed taking a mouthful of wine. Her eyes remained closed, her chin tilted upward, her lips curved in a faint smile.
“Mmm. So good. It’s been so long. Kale, organic quinoa . . . Why don’t they make organic chocolate éclairs? Now that would be some cancer treatment.”
“Cancer.” I didn’t know what to say. Eight years. And now this.
At length, I managed, “How long do you have?”
Pain creased her brow, and she cried out.
“Was three months, give or take. Looks like the schedule’s been accelerated.”
Before I knew what I was doing I found myself on my feet, yelling at the receptionist.
43
“No, no. This is the wrong street.” Marten squinted at an intersection. “Try that one.”
For the third time in a minute Marten cursed herself for being a lackwit, while simultaneously deriding herself for being a hopeful naïf.
She pictured again the memory of the man and woman on the street, and strained to squeeze more detail from it. A bald man and a woman. Why did it have to be Jack Griffen and Jane Worthington? (It didn’t, you fool.)
What had she seen that had caught at the back of her mind, tickling her awareness until she had paid it attention?
The woman. She had looked normal. Clothes. Handbag. Hair.
The man. He had looked, well, not out of place, exactly. But . . . he wasn’t bald. His head had been shaved, the skin of his scalp shone through lighter than the skin of his face. And his clothes. Shoes, jeans, long sleeve t-shirt. Taken individually, they weren’t noteworthy. But together, the ensemble was foreign.
(It’s Oxford. They’re tourists.)
And he hadn’t been holding hands with the woman. He’d been leading her. Tugging her along. Taking her somewhere.
(You’re a third wheel here, and you’re grasping at straws.)
One way to find out. If she could just find the building she had seen them enter.
Then she saw the bikes. A rank of red bicycles, all tilted at the same angle. Just beyond them, the pale grey door through which the man and woman had disappeared.
“That’s it. Pull up.”
Trent swung the car to the curb, ignoring the double line, and killed the engine.
In moments, he had his belt stowed, and his freshly issued pistol clear of its holster. It surprised Marten. He’d appeared to be barely tolerating her hunt for the anonymous couple. His hand was on the door latch, when her own found his shoulder. He turned, surprised.
“No,” she said. “You can’t leave the car here.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Probably. And you’ve been a fine help. But it’s probably nothing, and we can’t leave a patrol car parked on a double yellow.”
He snorted, “Come off it.”
“Look. If it is him, and we cause a scene out here, he’ll disappear. Same as he did at St Pancras.”
Trent’s face darkened.
“And if it is him,” she repeated, holding his gaze. “He knows your face. He doesn’t know mine.”
She glanced at the gun gripped in his hand. “And holster that weapon. I have enough paperwork to do.”
He scowled and slipped the gun back into its holster. She noted he’d forgotten to snap the security loop shut. It was a bad habit that could get him suspended, but now wasn’t the time to chew him out.
She opened the door, and stepped onto the sidewalk.
He leaned across. “And what are you going to do if Griffen’s in there?”
Marten smiled her winning best. “Why, come and get the cavalry, of course.” She shut the door without waiting for an answer, and strode toward the pale grey door, feeling an equal mixture of anticipation and embarrassment.
A moment later she was inside, peering into what was apparently the waiting room of a medical clinic, and brought to the sudden realization that neither mood had been right.
She found herself staring at a situation for which she was entirely unprepared.
44
“Forget the doctor,” I shouted at the receptionist. “Call an ambulance!”
Straight away I knew it was a mistake. My anger seemed to trigger in her a kind of paralysis response, like when a rabbit is caught in the jaws of a wolf, and it ceases to struggle by instinct. I noticed for the first time how young she was. Had Fate given me a trainee receptionist?
Trying hard to moderate my voice, I said, “She will die. Right here in your waiting room if you don’t help.”
Slowly, gaze fixed on me, the receptionist reached for the phone and began to dial it by feel. Clearly that instinct was just as fundamental.
Behind me, Jane cried out. An animal noise.
I turned to find her curled into a fetal position on the waiting room tiles. Through labored breathing she hissed, “Like a knife in the guts.” Dropping to my knees, I took her hand in mine. A spasm rocked her body, and her hand clenched.
“Jack.” A voice. I noticed for the first time that someone had entered the waiting room. A woman.
“Are you a doctor?” I said with a glance at her.
“Jack Griffen,” she said.
She was simply standing there, one step in from the doorway, one hand cupped still, as if holding the memory of the doorknob.
“Yes, I—” And then it hit me.
There was only one reason a person other than Jane would know my name here, in Oxford, UK, thousands of miles, and an eternity away from Perth, Western Australia.
“You’re a cop,” I said.
The slightest nod.
“I don’t care,” I said. “She’s dying, unless somebody does something.”
I heard a murmur from behind the receptionist’s desk, then the clunk of a handset.
“They’re sending an ambulance,” was all the receptionist said. She sat, gaze flicking between me and the newcomer.
“What’s wrong with her?” said the cop, gesturing at Jane. She took a step. One hand disappeared into a pocket—going for a phone, a gun?
“Poison,” I said.
“Cancer. Liver. Stage Four,” Jane grunted.
The cop moved two steps closer, then sat on a chair, on the other side of Jane from me. In front of her was a woman clearly fighting extreme discomfort, but her eye
s never left me, as if I were a tiger in the room. (Tiger, tiger, burning bright . . .) She withdrew her hand from her pocket. It held a delicate, pink handkerchief wholly at odds with her business-like mien. Despite everything, I must have smiled. Her brow crinkled with annoyance.
“I’ve been looking for you, Mr Griffen.”
“You found me,” I said. Jane’s face was a white one step above translucence. The veins at her temples were tiny purple squiggles. Her eyes were screwed shut as she strained to regulate her breathing.
“How long till that ambulance?” I asked the receptionist.
“They didn’t say.” She sounded like she had dropped acid in an attempt to check out of a day she had not expected.
“Why did you do it?”
Something in the cop’s tone made me look up. She spoke as if she knew me.
“Do what?”
Her gaze dipped to Jane’s writhing body.
Anger surged through my frame.
“Geez, lady—do you have a name?”
“DCI Lacroix.”
“Sorry, was the question, ‘When did I stop beating my wife?’”
It was the textbook cliché of a question with an embedded assumption. Either answer—yes or no—and you were damned, and she knew it.
“Okay, if we’re trading clichés; you’re innocent, is that it?” She sounded pissed, an improvement on ‘concerned’.
“Innocent? What a word. But this right here? Take a look. Connect the dots.”
She glanced at Jane, and in what seemed an automatic reaction, placed a steadying hand on her shoulder.
“You expect me to believe this isn’t your doing? Want to know how long your rap sheet is right now? And you’re the victim? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sense?” I hissed. Emotion warped my face. It didn’t know whether to cry or rage. “Sense? Put your bloody logic away for a moment and taste the world where people live.”
I turned back to Jane, said, “I couldn’t care less about the little fantasy you guys have got going.”
“So it’s all coincidence? You’re one unlucky guy, the way murder follows you around.”
“You’re confusing cause and effect, lady.”
“It’s Marten.” She hesitated. “I talked to your wife.”
That brought me up short. I didn’t correct her, either.
She went on. “She doesn’t believe you’re a murderer.”
“Good woman, that,” I said. We were staring at each other across Jane’s suddenly still body. Just on the limit of hearing came the whine of an ambulance. Marten seemed to hear it too. She tensed, and looked toward the street.
“Was I just talking to an ex-wife with misplaced loyalty?” So she knew all right.
I didn’t reply. I had to lean over Jane’s face to see that she was still breathing. Fast, shallow sips of air.
A buzzing noise reached my ears. Marten pulled her phone from her pants pocket, took one look at the screen, and dashed to the door. Then—an image that is embedded in my memory—she locked the door.
She spoke to the receptionist. “Tell me there’s a back way out of here.”
The receptionist pointed mutely down a short corridor.
The ambulance whine rose suddenly. It must have turned onto our street. In the same moment, the door knob rattled, and there came a pounding on the door. A shout came from the other side.
Marten turned to me, reached across and gripped my shirtfront with surprising violence.
“I worked bloody hard to get to where I am today. You’d better not turn out to be a murdering son-of-a-bitch, or I’ll hunt you till you’re strapped to the chair.”
Her vehemence surprised me out of the moment. “You sounded like Sherburn from Huckleberry Finn.”
“What?”
“Mark Twain,” I said.
“I haven’t read a novel since university.”
Hadn’t read a novel? “But—” The retort died on my lips as Jane’s hand gripped my leg. Her eyes were clamped shut, and she spoke with obvious pain.
“Go before this woman comes to her senses. And—” she swallowed. “Thanks.”
I reached down and took her hand in mine.
“For what?”
“For being a good man. You know what I mean.” Her eyes opened to slits and she looked at me. “Now get lost.”
“Jane, the melodrama,” I said, numbness stealing over me. “Just don’t die.” I leant forward and kissed her cheek. It was cold.
“That horse bolted,” she whispered, and her eyes closed again.
Looking up, I found Marten’s gaze on me.
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?”
I jerked a thumb in the direction of the back exit. “Why let me go?”
She stared at me, mute.
The door shuddered with another thump, and this time it was accompanied by a cracking noise.
I leapt to my feet, and with a last look at Jane—God, she didn’t look alive anymore—I raced down the corridor.
45
“Why let me go?”
Jack Griffen’s last words echoed in Marten Lacroix’s mind as she stared at the end of the corridor, her last sight of the man before he turned and disappeared again.
Why let me go?
God, there were a thousand reasons why not to.
Number one was now sniffling behind the reception counter. How was Marten going to swing allowing—no, positively abetting—the escape of Jack Griffen, the Intercontinental Killer?
And number two was about to break down the waiting room door. Trent would know Griffen had been here, and Marten had let him slip through their net.
Who was going to buy the truth? That Marten thought Trent was a trigger-happy liar, who would have interpreted the waiting room scene as a homicide about to happen, and shot Jack Griffen pointblank? The same Jack Griffen Marten had now seen in the flesh, and who, if Marten was any judge of character, had been genuinely distraught.
Or an Academy Award-winning actor.
Not according to the woman lying silent beneath Marten’s hand.
Marten hauled herself upright, fingers gently leaving the prone form of Jane Worthington, who had lapsed into unconsciousness.
She crossed the room and unlocked the door. It swung inward, and Marten was momentarily stunned. Before her stood Constable Trent, hunched low as if preparing to shoulder-charge. Behind him, two paramedics stood poised with kits. The raw wailing of the siren filled the air before it cut off in a heavy silence. The ambulance was double-parked outside, and through the door its light strobed the white walls of the anteroom. In the distance, police sirens wailed over the top of each other, phasing in and out.
Everyone was staring at her.
“’Bout time,” she said, and stepped aside to let them bustle past. Trent came first, gun raised. At the sight of Jane, the paramedics pushed past a protesting Trent, and gathered over her, opening kits. She was lost to sight.
Trent spun on the spot, glancing into every corner, seemingly trying to make sense of the scene.
At last he said, “Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where, Marten? And why the hell didn’t you answer my call? You promised.”
Marten returned his stare and arched an eyebrow. She let the silence draw out until he averted his gaze.
“DCI Lacroix,” he added. “Ma’am.”
“He escaped. And I was unable to answer your call as there was a woman dying on the floor at my feet.” She flicked her gaze at the paramedics still huddled over Jane.
Trent persisted. “He didn’t come out the front. So, which way did he go?”
Marten jerked a thumb at the corridor, and Trent rushed down it.
Steeling herself, Marten padded over to the receptionist. A quick appraisal told her the receptionist had slipped into post-traumatic shock in record time. If ever the girl would be clay to mold, it would be now. But all Marten could bring herself to do was offer the woman a hand on the
shoulder, and murmur that it was okay now, the paramedics were here.
“You did well,” Marten soothed, while her stomach churned. Had the woman seen her lock the door? Or observed her interaction with Griffen through her stupor? No telling now.
She left the reception desk, as Trent returned.
“No sign of him,” he said, and swore. “I can’t believe we came all the way here, actually found him, and he got away again. The captain is going to grind my—”
“Constable.”
He fell silent, expression hunted.
“There’s nothing more you could have done. It was my call to come in here alone. It was the right call. He doesn’t know me.”
She gripped his shoulder. “And, hey, at least he didn’t shoot at you this time, right?”
The paramedics were moving Jane. Trent seemed to notice her for the first time.
“And he’s done it again. Killed another one.”
“She’s not dead,” said Marten.
One of the paramedics caught her eye as they bore Jane out. He shook his head.
Oh, shit.
46
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell.
The lyric went around in my head, mainly because I couldn’t remember the next line, but also because it was—apropos?
Apropos doesn’t end with an ‘S’ sound.
Ah-pro-poh, is how you say it.
Ah-pro-Edgar-Allen-Poe.
Nevermore.
Sigh.
I’m not crazy . . .
My legs dangled down the wharf front, a yard above the churn of froth where the waves met concrete. Seaweed mingled with Coke cans. I kicked my legs lazily in time to the music in my head. They felt strangely heavy.
I’d boarded the first train not bound for London, and ended up here. Southport, or Portsmouth, or . . . None of the signs had sunk in. I kept seeing Jane laying on the waiting room floor, scrunched into a ball. Not fighting it, just enduring. Waiting.
Looking up, I could see buoys beginning to sway heavily in the rising tide, like upside-down pendulums, 10-foot mechanical metronomes. Gulls wheeled in the sky, crying warning. Much farther out, at the limit of vision, a wall of rain approached.
