by Tim Weaver
‘I can walk away, if you’d prefer.’
‘I just want to know why you’re here.’
‘What does it matter?’
‘You know why it matters.’
‘Are you scared that this is some sort of trap?’
‘You think that’s so unreasonable?’
She took a last drag on her cigarette and then dropped it to the ground. It flashed orange briefly, hot ash scattering, but then everything died and the gloom returned.
‘You can work the angles I can’t,’ she said eventually.
I smirked. ‘So you want me to do your job?’
‘You’ve been doing that from the minute that woman turned up at the station, Raker, so don’t take the moral high ground with me, okay? Carmichael’s barking up the wrong tree with this. I don’t like the way he works, I don’t like the way he runs his teams or his investigations, and I don’t like the way he sees this case as a vessel to do his mates in the Met a favour – the ones you’ve managed to piss off at various points in the last six or seven years. We’re wasting time trying to connect you to this, trying to slap some crime on you based on how much of a pain in the arse you are, when we should be trying to figure out where the bloody hell Roddat magicked himself from and how this woman has vanished into thin air.’
I calmed myself and tried to think.
‘It’s definitely a suicide?’ I asked.
‘As opposed to what? A murder?’ She shook her head. ‘No, you can forget that. Roddat had no defensive wounds, there was nothing to indicate a struggle. His injuries and bruising were consistent with suicide by hanging. In all my years working murders, I’ve never seen someone fake a hanging. It’s too easy to balls it up: you’ve got to take into consideration body weight, the knot, the strength of the rope, the suspension of it. You’ve got to think about how much the body is going to jerk after the platform is gone. Whatever else, he definitely hanged himself.’
Her attention shifted to the road, then to me: ‘There’s something else you should know. After McMillan didn’t turn up for his flight yesterday, we got a warrant and went to the hospital to look around his office.’
I eyed her. ‘Did you find something?’
‘His file on you is a page long.’
I didn’t know what to say to that; all I could feel was relief.
‘The notes he made on a guy he treated for a year and a half, supposedly the victim of a quite rare and extremely serious condition, extend to a single page. So that doesn’t make sense. And then, this morning, we got the results back from the blood test Dr Carson did on you at your house.’ She paused. ‘They found benzodiazepines.’
Tranquillizers.
I felt another weight lift. ‘So McMillan really did drug me?’
‘It looks that way.’
Again, there was no apology – not in words – but her head tilted slightly and I saw enough. This was as contrite as Catherine Field ever got.
‘McMillan drugged me. Maybe he made Roddat look like a suicide too.’
‘It was a suicide, Raker, okay? It’s not a set-up. The only person who set it up was Gavin Roddat when he climbed on to that chair and put the noose around his neck.’ She stopped for a couple of seconds and then said, ‘Look, for what it’s worth, I had to ask the question about Derryn and Roddat because it was an obvious place to go. If they didn’t meet that way, then they must have met somewhere else, somehow else. He has her picture all over the place, and he marches a woman who looks like Derryn out of a flat, having previously taken hundreds – who knows, maybe thousands – of photos of her as well. You don’t do either of those things on a whim. The question of who this woman is and why she would pretend to be Derryn, why I can’t ID her, why I can’t find her anywhere, and where the hell she’s been hiding for the last eight years, if she’s been hiding at all – clearly, the answers lay in the life of the real Derryn Raker.’
She looked at her watch again and, as she did, I felt my guts twist: I didn’t want to have to go back, as much as I knew Field was right. I wasn’t scared that I might find out something corrupting about Derryn, about our marriage, about who she was, because I believed – in every single part of me – that that thing didn’t exist. When I told Field that Derryn had never cheated on me, it wasn’t just my ego talking. It was the truth.
The reason I didn’t want to go back was much simpler: it hurt. Every time I got on to my knees and scooped away more of the earth that covered her, every time I questioned everything that I knew to be true, I ruined a part of her memory. I would have given anything for it to have been her, on that first day, in the interview room at Charing Cross – but now I wanted the opposite. I just wanted to find the woman and ask her why she was doing this. How did she know so much about me? Why was she ruining my life? I just wanted Derryn – my Derryn – to be laid to rest.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Field said. ‘Is there anything else?’
I was about to say no, but – as I thought again about the ways in which Derryn and Gavin Roddat may have crossed paths – an idea came to me: ‘How long has Roddat lived in London?’
‘About two years. He moved down in November 2015.’
I tried to align my thoughts.
‘What’s on your mind, Raker?’
‘I was going to suggest checking his medical history.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I was thinking he might have met Derryn when she was a nurse.’
Field nodded. ‘He could have been a patient of hers – but the timings aren’t right.’ She meant Roddat hadn’t moved down from Manchester until 2015; Derryn had already been dead for six years by then.
Except something was niggling at me.
‘Raker?’
And now it wouldn’t stop.
‘Raker, are you all right?’
A patient of Derryn’s.
Field said my name again, and then again, and then came closer, but this time I barely registered any of it. All I could see was a series of disconnected images, a memory, shuddering to the surface.
‘Raker. What the hell is the matter with you?’
‘Wait a second,’ I said, ‘wait a second.’
‘What?’
I closed my eyes.
‘Raker?’
I didn’t answer, trying to form the memory properly.
‘Raker, are you going to talk to me or not?’
‘Give me a second. There was this one time, I … her and I …’
I trailed off. The memory was still opaque.
It had come out of nowhere, but as I held up a hand to Field, as I asked her to wait, as I tried to connect the images, everything became a little more distinct. Not lucid, but lucid enough.
‘There was this guy – way back.’
‘A guy? What guy?’
‘This was years and years ago.’
‘Who was the guy, Raker?’
‘He was someone she treated.’
She paused, suddenly understanding why I’d stopped responding to her, why I’d become so distant. ‘Someone Derryn treated? A patient of hers?’
‘Yes.’
‘You remember someone?’
‘Yes. Not clearly – I only met him briefly – but …’
‘But what?’ Field pressed, taking another step closer.
‘I haven’t thought about him at all since it happened,’ I said, looking out towards the street, trying to form his face against the grey blur of the rain. ‘All I remember is, this guy, this patient of hers, there was something weird about him.’
#0762
I started waiting outside the ward for you again. You didn’t come out. I watched the other nurses leave, bleary-eyed from the night shift – but not you. I looked through the glass panel on the security door, and could see staff milling around, doctors sitting slouched over reports and paperwork, and then a few patients shuffling about in the background, pale-skinned and sick, but you were nowhere to be seen. You weren’t at home, you weren’t at work, so where
were you?
I got my answer two days later.
I’d spent whatever time I could in the hospital foyer, sitting on the benches in the corner next to the pharmacy, hoping to catch you, because you’d have to come out this way, from the ward, to get to the staff car park or to head to the Tube. But the longer I went without seeing you, the more I started to wonder: were you on a different ward in another department, leaving from an exit I didn’t know about? Had you got a new job at another hospital, or somewhere else in the city?
In the end, it turned out to be none of those things.
I finally got to see the real reason you’d become so hard to find. I came to understand why that Spanish nurse had seemed so reticent to talk about you outside the ward, and why your hours were so irregular.
You were no longer just an employee at the hospital.
You were a patient.
One of the porters wheeled you into the foyer, talking to you as he did. You were smiling. Even as sick as you looked – your skin as grey as ash and as thin as tracing paper, your body small in your clothes, shrunken, rolled in on itself – you still managed a smile. As I watched you, I could barely move, my entire body glued to the seat. It was like looking at a reflection of you, a distortion, an image in a fairground mirror. Where was Derryn? Where was the woman I’d come to know? Why had you never told me you were sick? That’s what happens when you have a connection with someone. You tell them important things. You share. You help each other through.
I got up, my legs unsteady, and watched as the porter carried on pushing the wheelchair across the foyer. You said something to him, which he didn’t hear, and then he slowed down and leaned in to you and you said it to him again, and he erupted into laughter. A few people glanced in his direction, seeing where the noise had come from, and then their eyes came to rest on you instead, and they stared as if you were some circus freak. Out of nowhere, I felt a tremor of anger. How dare they do that. How dare they stare at you like that. One of them, a woman in her late fifties with an awful sagging face and small eyes like a pig, made a comment to a man seated beside her, and that was when I started moving. I headed towards her, my fists clenched, teeth clamped so hard together I could hear ringing in my ears.
When I got to the woman, I knelt down beside her and said, ‘Excuse me,’ my voice just a whisper. She turned in her seat, surprised, uncertain if I was addressing her, and then I said, ‘If you ever pass comment on that woman again, I’ll rip out your fucking heart.’
She sucked in a breath, shocked, appalled.
I stood, looking down at her, my eyes boring into hers, and I saw her wither and shrivel under my gaze, and then I began moving again: you’d briefly gone out of sight, as the porter wheeled you to the main entrance, but I soon found you.
Slowing down, I settled on a viewpoint about eight feet back. You’d come to a halt, side on to me, the porter adjusting the blanket that had been placed over your legs.
‘You need to keep warm,’ I heard him say.
‘I’m fine, Clive,’ you replied, your voice faint, a little crackly, a needle trying to find the grooves of an old record. ‘Honestly,’ you said as the porter continued to adjust the blanket. You said it so gently, so kindly, and squeezed the porter’s arm. ‘I don’t even really need this wheelchair.’
‘I know, I know,’ he replied, and stopped moving the blanket, dropping to his haunches beside the wheelchair instead. He smiled at you, said something I couldn’t hear, and then looked out of the front entrance. From the way he was around you, the way you were so comfortable in each other’s company, it was obvious that he knew you: not just because he’d wheeled you out here, but because you’d talked before, lots of times, during the period you’d worked here as a nurse. You and this Clive person knew each other, liked each other, had some sort of bond, even if only small.
As I recognized that, I felt a stab of jealousy.
‘I can walk from here,’ you said to the porter eventually, and when he replied that he would tell you off if you did – his voice half-disguised by the noise of a bus pulling in outside – you said, ‘Okay, Clive, I’ll stay here. But I’ll be all right on my own. I’ll see you again the next time I’m in, okay? You can update me on Amy.’
‘I’ll tell her you said hello.’
‘Do,’ you said. ‘I hope her exams go well.’
Clive stood, gave your arm a gentle squeeze, and you smiled at him again. Despite how you looked, how you sounded, despite everything you were now, nothing could dilute that smile. It lit up the entire atrium. It was like breath to me.
The porter left, looking back at you as he passed me. I watched him go, disappearing along the corridor until it took a left turn, and then I approached you.
‘Derryn?’
You turned in your wheelchair.
Up close, you looked terrible. It was hard to even reconcile the woman who’d looked after me on the ward only months ago with the woman in front of me now.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
A flicker of recollection this time, and then you said, ‘Oh, hello.’ Your voice sounded worse up close – torn, and frayed, and broken – and I could see that your hair had started to fall out. It looked like a forest after a fire had passed through, sparse, fitful lumps of hair still rooted in place, clinging on even after everything else had been destroyed.
‘You’re ill,’ I said.
You broke into a smile. ‘Yes. It seems that I am.’
It was a stupid thing to say, and I instantly regretted it, but you didn’t make me feel small. Instead, you turned the wheelchair slightly, rotating it around, and then reached under the blanket that was covering your legs, looking for something.
I watched you.
Finally, you brought out a book from your lap, your hands white and very thin, the bones showing through, your fingertips covering some of the front cover.
But I knew what it was.
It was a copy of The Man with the Wolf’s Head.
In that moment, I think I fell in love with you even more than before, because it was obvious that you were reading it for me. You were reading my book, for me.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
You frowned. ‘For what?’
But I barely heard your response. I’d spent months being so angry at you for the way you seemed to suggest The Man with the Wolf’s Head was worth less than Eva Gainridge’s other novels, for the gratitude you seemed to lack when I gave you that rare copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night, but suddenly the embers of how you’d made me feel before – the frustration I’d had, the anger, the confusion – were gone. I felt renewed. This was a fresh start.
I took a step closer and said, ‘I thought your favourite Gainridge was No One Can See the Crows at Night?’
‘Oh, it is,’ you said, looking down at your copy of the book. It was the 2008 anniversary edition with the blue and silver cover. ‘It’s just, I haven’t read this one for a while – so I thought, as I had the time, I may as well refresh my memory.’
You smiled again.
How were you still managing to smile when you looked so bad? How could I tell you how much you’d consumed me and hurt me in the time since we’d last met?
‘Have you been away?’ I asked.
You frowned again.
‘I just haven’t seen you around, is all.’
‘Why, have you been back in hospital?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘More complications with the skull fracture?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’
I hated lying to you.
The frown remained, a look on your face that I couldn’t quite interpret, and then it dissolved and you said, ‘Yes, I’ve been away, down to the coast. I was trying to do something other than think about this worthless body of mine.’
‘It’s not worthless.’
‘That’s sweet. The truth is, I don’t really need this wheelchair to get around, but I figure I may as
well get used to it.’ You forced another smile and then showed me the book again. ‘Anyway, this is a way to distract me.’
When I looked into your eyes, something shimmered in them, the hint of tears, and I realized, in that moment, I truly did love you. I just wanted to wrap my arms around you and keep you safe. I wasn’t like that porter. You wouldn’t persuade me to leave you here, waiting for a taxi. I’d refuse to go. I was going to take you home, and undress you, and bath you, and run my fingers over your skin, even though your bones were starting to come through. It didn’t matter that you’d upset me, that your home was so staid, that you’d dismissed me on that last day I’d been in hospital like I was just any other patient. I’d watched you walk away from my bed and you hadn’t even looked back, hadn’t even been there to say goodbye when I was discharged. I had to seek you out, had to wait for you outside the ward, in order to continue what we had. But none of that mattered any more. I’d forgiven you your mistakes. I was here for you. Me, no one else.
‘Do you know why you first caught my eye?’ I said.
You frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘When you were looking after me, when I started having problems with my fracture, have you got any idea why you first caught my eye? I mean, it wasn’t just because you were my nurse. You were everybody’s nurse in there.’ I dropped down to your level, on to my haunches, and you leaned away slightly, suspicion now evident in your face. It annoyed me, but I let it go. ‘Your eyes were so full of light.’
You just stared at me.
‘Your smile lit up the entire room, Derryn.’
‘I, uh …’
‘It’s okay. I realize this is a lot for you to take in, especially when you’re like this. My timing’s not great, I know that. But I so desperately want to tell you something. I want to tell you that I lov–’
‘Sorry, sweetheart.’
I looked up. We both did. A man was standing in front of us, tall, handsome I suppose, dark hair, a week’s beard growth. He looked tired, drained. The whites of his eyes were forked with tiny blood vessels and I couldn’t decide if it was a result of exhaustion or tears. He looked at me, his expression hardening, as if he’d glimpsed an animal – a threat that might concern him.
