by Val McDermid
And she was right in the thick of it. There was no hiding place. A bare wooden bench bolted to the floor ran along the wall opposite the counter that protected the custody sergeant from the onslaught. Whoever was waiting for the next stage of their custodial experience was dumped on the bench and there they slumped. One or two looked her over, as if she was an unexpected possibility in the wreckage of their evening, but mostly they were too drunk, stoned, ill or terrified to pay her any attention. Her flesh crawled at the occasional contact.
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, she had to contend with the shame of needing to be rescued. It all might have been bearable if she’d still been mistress of her own destiny. But no. That had been stripped away along with her dignity. She’d had to call Tony to come out in the night and save her from herself. What did it say about her that he was the only person she could turn to with absolute certainty that he’d drop whatever he was doing to help her? A man married to a job ministering to people so fucked up they couldn’t be allowed out to play with the rest of humanity. A man who had all the social skills of a dormouse. A man who persisted in sticking around even after she’d blamed him for every disaster in her own life.
Carol sighed so deeply the junkie next to her jerked upright, as if he’d lost sight of the fact there were other people in the room. ‘Wha’?’ he shouted, looking around wildly.
She inched away and told herself to skip the self-pity. It could be worse, you could be one of these lost souls. Instead, she reminded herself of all the reasons she should see Tony Hill as a blessing. She knew no one who was a better reader of human beings and their behaviour. He was clever and surprising; once he admitted you into his world, it was impossible to be bored. He was loyal and kind in his own distinctive way and he made her laugh. Though not generally when he intended to. He refused to abandon her in spite of everything, and if she would only let him, he was more likely to help her climb out of the hole of her misery than anyone else.
Her brother Michael had once accused her of being in love with him. She didn’t think love was the right word. She didn’t think there actually was a word for the complicated matrix of feelings that bound her to Tony and him to her. With anyone else, so much intimacy would inevitably have led them to bed. But in spite of the chemistry between them, in spite of the sparks and the intensity, it was as if there was an electric fence between them. And that was on the good days.
Lately, there had been no good days.
Tonight was simply another spit to add to the trench that separated them now. Another unreasonable demand that he would meet with an equanimity that would be worse than anger. Maybe it was time for her to acknowledge that she missed him more than she blamed him.
The custody sergeant put the phone down and glanced across at her. ‘Carol Jordan? There’s someone in reception to pick you up.’ He looked around. ‘PC Sharman, take her through to reception, there’s a good lad. You’ll get confirmation of your court date in a day or two. Don’t forget to turn up. Come round sober tomorrow and you can have your car keys back.’
She followed the young officer through a door, down a corridor and through another door into an identikit reception area. It could have been any police station in any town. There he was, sitting on a plastic chair under a poster about home security, intent on some stupid game on his phone. He didn’t even look up when she walked into the room.
The PC left her to it and she crossed to where he sat, thumbs busy on the screen. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.
Startled, he jumped up, almost dropping his phone. ‘Carol,’ he said, a smile lighting up his tired face. ‘How are you?’
‘I feel stone-cold sober, though the breathalyser doesn’t agree with me. Can we get out of here?’
He gestured towards the street doors and followed her in silence out into the bitter cold of the night. ‘I’m parked round the corner,’ he said, taking the lead when she stopped and gave him a questioning look.
Carol sat hunched in the passenger seat while Tony scraped ice from the windscreen with the edge of a credit card. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation that lay ahead but there was no way out of it. It was the price of rescue and it couldn’t be worse than spending the night in a cell.
Eventually they set off, locked in silence. As they reached the outskirts of the town, Tony said, ‘You’ll have to direct me. I don’t know the way to yours from this side.’
‘Stay on this road through Hebden Bridge, then I’ll tell you where to turn.’ It was a novelty, being driven by Tony. By unspoken agreement, she’d always driven them, whether they’d been on police business or not. He was, in her eyes, the very definition of a bad driver. Easily distracted by other road users, not to mention whatever was going on in his own head, then twitchy on the brakes, vague on priorities at junctions and always four miles an hour under the speed limit except when he forgot about it altogether. Fortunately, Tony’s clapped-out Volvo was almost the only vehicle on the road, so she’d be spared any indecisive attempts at overtaking on the minor roads they’d be driving down.
‘Did they say when you’ll be up in court?’
‘Wednesday. They don’t hang about.’
He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘That’s fine. There’s nothing I can’t rearrange.’
‘You don’t have to be there. I just needed a lift home, that’s all.’ She knew she seemed ungrateful but she was struggling so hard not to give way to tears that she didn’t dare invite sympathy or kindness.
‘Of course I have to be there. Somebody’s got to get you there and home again. Plus, you shouldn’t drive between now and the hearing.’ The streetlights ran out and he leaned forward, peering into the darkness.
‘It’s perfectly legal for me to drive between now and then,’ she said, not caring that she sounded peevish.
‘The magistrates would like you better if you stayed off the road.’
Carol snorted in derision. ‘It makes no odds whether they like me or not. It’s a twelve-month driving ban and a fine and my insurance fucked up and a criminal record, and no amount of grovelling will make any difference.’
‘It might make the difference between twelve months and fifteen months,’ he said.
‘What? Suddenly you’re the expert on drink-driving sentencing?’
He said nothing.
Carol threw her hands in the air, exasperated with herself. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a bitch. I appreciate you doing this.’
His lips tightened but he said nothing.
‘I can’t quite believe it, you know,’ she said, needing to fill the silence. ‘It’s less than three miles from the end of George Nicholas’s drive to my front door. Three miles of road that goes from nowhere to nowhere. Talk about bad luck. What are the chances of that?’
‘You ran out of chances tonight, Carol,’ Tony said. ‘That’s because you’ve been taking chances for a while now. Going by the law of averages, you’re long overdue tonight.’
‘Bullshit, Tony. Really, bullshit. I know my limits, I know when I’m not safe behind the wheel. I never drive when I’ve had too much.’
‘You might think you’re safe, but you’d have been over the limit. Be honest. We both know you’ve spent most of the last few years over the limit. And I’m not talking about a one-off Saturday night out. Carol, this is your wake-up call.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she exploded. ‘Just because I’m a captive audience doesn’t mean you get to preach a sermon.’
‘It’s not a sermon, it’s an intervention. Tonight’s made me realise I’ve been biting my tongue for too long. I can’t stand by any more and watch you destroying yourself, Carol.’
‘What? I’ve hardly seen you in months. You’ve not exactly been watching me do anything. And I’m not destroying myself, I’m trying to put myself back together. Which you’d know if you’d actually been acting like a friend.’ Streetlights again. Shop windows and traffic lights. Carol squirmed round in the seat so she could sta
re out of the side window. She didn’t want him to see her face. She didn’t want him reading what he wanted to believe.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been acting like a friend. I’ve been running scared. For too long I’ve been telling myself that if I told you the truth I might lose you for good. And I didn’t want to risk that.’
She could feel a lump in her throat, tears threatening to break through her armour. ‘Next right, past the chippie,’ she said.
Tony swung the car off the main road and drove between tall ranks of terraced stone houses, looming dark apart from the occasional dim glow from a stair light or an opaque bathroom window. And then they were back in open country. ‘You’ve got to stop drinking, Carol. It’s a wall between you and the rest of us. The people who care about you. The people who might care about you if you gave them half a chance. Look at you. You’re a brilliant woman. You’re tough, you’re tenacious, you’re beautiful and you’re bright as hell. And what are you doing with your life? You’ve cut yourself off. You’re using Michael and Lucy’s death as an excuse to focus on your love affair with Pinot Grigio and vodka. And where has it brought you? A Saturday-night police cell, along with the other drunks and the junkies and the terminally fucked-up.’
‘I’m not a drunk,’ she shouted. ‘Liking a drink doesn’t make me a drunk. You are completely out of order.’
‘I’m not. I’m back in line for the first time in a very long time. And this time I’m not walking away.’ He stopped at a T-junction. ‘Left or right?’
‘Left. Then a mile down the road, you take a right. Actually, no. Drop me at the corner. It’s only a mile from there. I’d rather walk.’
Tony gave a sardonic laugh. ‘In those shoes? My company must be worse than I thought. I’m driving you home, Carol. And then I’m staying over.’
‘What? What do you mean, staying over? There’s nowhere for you to sleep.’
‘There’s a whole barn. I brought my sleeping bag in case you don’t have a spare bed.’
‘No.’
‘Can we talk about this when we get there? Only, I need to concentrate.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘You can pretend all you like, but I know you’re not happy like this. And I can’t ignore that any longer. Whether you like it or not, Carol, it’s time you took your life back from the bottle.’
11
Watching again. Waiting again. Wondering again whether this was the one. Ideally, he’d like to see inside her home before he made a final decision. He needed the kind of stairs that had a balustrade with spindles. You couldn’t hang someone when the bannister had a solid wall beneath it.
He didn’t mind waiting. He had plenty to occupy his mind. Killing time like this reminded him of where the debt he was owed had begun. It was a Sunday evening. His dad had promised him his mum was coming home that night. He’d been excited at the news, though he knew better than to show it. Lately, his life had changed in ways that enraged his father and baffled him.
It all started when his mum had announced she was going on a day trip to somewhere down south called Greenham Common. He’d never heard the name before. He’d only been eight years old; his world consisted of Bradfield, where all his family lived, and Torremolinos, where they went every summer on a charter flight from Bradfield airport for a week of sunburn and Spanish tummy. He’d heard of London and Manchester and Leeds but he’d never been to any of them and had only the haziest notion of how far away they were. Greenham Common, apparently, meant getting up at six because it was at least three hours on a coach. And it was women only.
He’d asked her what was at Greenham Common. Was it like a hotel? Or a beach? His mum had laughed and said no, it was American nuclear missiles and a women’s peace camp that was protesting about them. He didn’t understand why people were protesting about missiles. Missiles were good things, they meant you could fight back when people attacked you.
‘Nobody’s going to attack us,’ his mum had said.
‘You know that, do you? You’ve got the Russians’ personal guarantee of that, have you?’ his dad had demanded with a tired belligerence.
‘Nobody’s going to use nuclear weapons, Pete, don’t be stupid. They all know now about nuclear winter. It’d be the end of life as we know it. We’d be back in the Dark Ages, only worse, with mutations and all sorts.’
‘So if nobody’s going to use them, what’s the problem? They might as well be here as anywhere else.’
‘Apart from anything else, they’re a symbol of how this island’s nothing more than a giant floating aircraft carrier for America.’
He’d tuned out somewhere around there. He hadn’t properly understood much except that his mum and her pals were going to make a human fence round the place where the missiles were. Which seemed a weird thing to do. Like giving them a great big hug.
Him and his dad had watched the news that night and they’d seen a story about Greenham Common with pictures of women shouting at policemen then being carried away by them. There had been soldiers too, staring straight in front of them as if the women and the police were in another dimension. He’d been in bed by the time his mum got home, but at breakfast the next morning she’d been as excited as he’d been the day before his birthday party. His dad had just grunted.
It turned out that there was a whole camp at Greenham Common. Not like the cub camp he’d gone to the summer before, where they’d slept inside wooden huts and done lots of activities on the site and in the woods around it. There weren’t even proper tents, according to his dad. Only plastic sheets stretched over tree branches bent over and pegged to the ground. That’s why they were called benders, his mum said. His dad said something he didn’t understand and his mum flared up at him and said a word he didn’t know. When he asked her later what a lesbian was, she said he was too young to understand but it was a way of people showing they loved each other.
Anyway, his mum had got a taste for going camping at Greenham, even though it wasn’t summer. At first, it was just for a couple of nights at a time. Then she started going every other week for the whole week. He didn’t like it when she was gone. They had boring tea every night. Beans on toast or bacon and eggs with the yolks all hard and the edges of the whites all crispy. And his dad was always in a bad mood.
But his mum kept on about saving the planet for the future and the importance of sisterhood and how women united were strong. ‘I thought that was the miners,’ his dad had muttered.
‘Them too. Solidarity, that’s what it’s about. We’re fighting a war here.’
Which had confused him because he thought the whole point of Greenham was that it was a peace camp. His dad swore about it a lot when there were pictures on the news. He said the boy’s mum had been led astray by gobby bitches who wanted to convert normal women to their unnatural ways. That she’d been happy enough with her life before they’d started pumping their nonsense into her head, brainwashing her with their feminist ideas. She took to reading as well, in a big way. Later, he came across some of the books at school. Sylvia Plath. Virginia Woolf. Going to Greenham had made his mum somebody else’s puppet, his dad complained.
That Sunday night, they were waiting for her to come home. His dad had tried shouting and arguing to make his mum stay at home, but this week, he said he was going to try something different. ‘Soft soap,’ he said. And that made sense because there were no bathrooms at Greenham and his mum always came home gagging for a bath and clean clothes. His dad had prepared a special tea too. He’d gone to Marks & Spencer and bought two tins of chunky chicken in a special white sauce, and they were going to have it with oven chips and frozen peas. Then his mum would know how pleased they were to have her home.
She was due back about four o’clock. By the time it got to five, his dad was totally fed up. He’d opened a can of beer and he was smoking one cigarette after another till the living room was like a gas chamber. He’d left his dad to it and gone upstairs to his bedroom where he
could look down the street and watch out for the battered old Volkswagen camper van that his mum’s pal Muriel gave her a lift in. He sat cross-legged on his bed, willing the orange-and-white van to appear, as if desire could make it happen.
That’s how he knew the police were coming before his dad did. The blue-and-white panda car stopped outside their front door and two cops got out, a man and a woman. He hurtled downstairs and yanked the front door open before they’d even reached it.
‘Is your dad in, son?’ the man asked.
Before he could say anything, a waft of acrid smoke answered for him. All at once, his dad was there, a protective hand on his shoulder. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he said in tones of disgust. ‘Has she gone and got herself arrested?’
‘If we could come inside?’ the woman said, a sympathetic smile on her face.
When he looked back, that had been the last moment in his childhood that had held any promise of happiness. Right then, in his head, his mum was still alive. Still there for him. Still somewhere between Greenham Common and his bedroom.
They’d been less than an hour from home when it happened. A fuel tanker in a crash. A diesel spill. A camper van sliding through 360 degrees and ending up wrapped round the central reservation of the M6. Three women dead. But only one he cared about.
His dad had taken refuge in rage. It was as if he wanted the boy’s mum back so he could shout at her and tell her how stupid she’d been to listen to those bloody women. It did make sense, the way he told it. Even if the boy had wanted to argue the toss, he couldn’t have faulted the logic. Until the women at the peace camp turned his mum’s head, she was perfectly happy, and so was he.
