As of 2pm the phone just rang and rang. I had been expecting the latest on David Tregaskis. Then I saw from my window, the Thames Valley police coming up the drive, the dread procession. Niamh ushered them in, Detective Franklin and his sergeant Parker, he carrying one of Eloise’s Vuitton bags. Had I released from my care a Miss Eloise Keaton, did I know a Mr Leon Worrell? The XJ Jaguar, found ablaze down a bank in some woodland … Woman inside, ‘too terribly burnt for a positive ID’. My chest was full of knives, intolerable pain, I needed some moments for composure. At a certain point I switched on the transcriber. I will need to be clear on my legal position.
DF: …Ten o’clock this morning, sir, we got a call to the site of what appeared to be a car crash, vehicle ablaze, it had come off a track and down a steep drop in the Warrendale Forest, off the A40. The fire brigade were already attending, it was them called us. And once the blaze was out they confirmed what they’d thought, which is there was a body in the passenger seat, female. The investigating officer had one look and rated it suspicious. So we got in there, traced the vehicle registration to a Mr Curtis James of Wood Green, London. Mr James told us he’d loaned the car to his friend Mr Worrell a couple of days ago – in order that Mr Worrell come and collect Miss Keaton from your premises?
SH: Yes. That’s right. That’s correct.
DF: Miss Keaton had been staying with you how long, sir?
SH: I treated her for depression these last five weeks. It had been – a success.
DF: So in your opinion she was in a good fit mental state?
SH: The treatment was successful. She was ready to go home.
SP: And with Mr Worrell?
SH: They were in a relationship, she asked that I send for him to get her.
DF: Did you have a notion where she and Mr Worrell were headed once they left?
SH: Yes, Eloise told me they were planning to spend a night in a hotel in Oxfordshire. Then carry on down to London in the morning, to Miss Keaton’s flat in Holland Park.
SP: Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?
SH: I’m sorry, the body in the car, there’s no question, is there, that it mightn’t be Miss Keaton …?
DF: As I said, sir, we can’t try to make any formal identification ’til the post-mortem, that’ll happen tomorrow. Like as not it’ll have to be on dental records. But, considering the luggage in the boot, and we have a description from an eyewitness that puts a blonde woman in the car half an hour before the incident – and the pathologist on the scene reckoned this was a woman in her mid-twenties … We feel it’s very likely, I’m afraid. However, we took the view not to contact her next of kin until we’d spoken to yourself.
SH: And what about Leon Worrell? Where is he?
DF: As I say, there are circumstances here we consider suspicious, sir. There’s clearly a need for an investigation.
SH: Can you tell me, what you think happened? With the car?
DF: First we knew of this business was from a member of the public driving on the A40 – concerned citizen, a doctor, as it happens. He’d been sitting behind the Jag for a few miles, had been admiring it, I think. Then it started looking to him all of a sudden like the vehicle was being driven a bit – ‘erratically’, he said. Weaving. And as he went to overtake, he saw some sort of altercation going on between the gentleman driving and the woman beside him – he said it looked to him like a struggle for the wheel, the woman very agitated. He drove on, our witness, but he saw in his rear-view that they turned off the motorway, onto the road to Warrendale Forest. He was bothered by it, got off at the next slip road, came back round. And he followed the road into the woods, to the point where there’s no access but by this rutted old track that runs along the top of a ridge. There’s a steep drop off to the left, down a bank into a ravine. Our chap, since he hasn’t seen a soul he parks, gets out, has a stroll, and then he sees smoke, hears the crackle of fire and some bangs like shots, and sure enough he sees the Jag’s there, about fifty feet down this slope, smacked into a tree and burning. At which point he gets on his phone to the fire brigade. Fire brigade get there, put out the fire and they call Police Homicide.
SH: On what grounds?
DF: Evidently the car left the track, travelled down the slope until the trees broke its path. The question is why the car was burning. Whether it was burning before or after the impact. Whether it was forced off the track, or driven off the track, or propelled off it – whether we’re looking at an accident or a felony. The fire brigade’s investigating officer didn’t read it as an accident. He smelled petrol in the car interior, the clothes, the upholstery. We’re not liking the look of the ground on the track – the pattern of footprints.
SH: As would suggest?
SP: That the car was propelled down the slope. From stationary.
SH: You’re seriously proposing Leon Worrell would have done this deliberately?
DF: Oh at this stage, sir, we’re not advancing anything. But Mr Worrell’s departure from the scene, it— poses questions. Doesn’t particularly speak up for him, you might say. Under the circumstances. Which have the look of a concerted effort to destroy a vehicle and a body … Are you all right, sir?
SH: I’m sorry, it’s— it’s very hard for me, to take in, to accept what you’re proposing. Leon and Eloise, they were in a relationship.
SP: Mr James told us the same thing, sir. But he gave us the impression that it was a— quite a turbulent one? As relationships go …?
From here, things deteriorated sharply. A set of suspicions is already hardening into a bed of nails. I was asked who else would wish Eloise ill, and since I had no alternative suggestions their silence seemed to conclude that Leon certainly did.
They wanted to see Eloise’s room. I had Brian show them up. Eloise’s bag remained on my table, a lapse on their part. I couldn’t help myself, I opened it up, released her scent, her folded things inside unsullied by the smoke damage. I took a swathe of that green dress of hers between my fingertips, but by tugging it I saw the black Forrest mask fall free of its folds, and I snatched the fucking thing, confiscated it – since it had no place there, never did, and ought now to be destroyed, eradicated, made to disappear like its maker.
19
Dr Lochran’s Journal
The shape of a man
September 24th
Our poor houseguest is in a simply horrendous state, such that I’ve put him on the same Remeron he once prescribed for Robert. By his own admission it’s a huge undertaking for him to hold himself together through a day’s shift of work. For myself – well, I might have helped pull Steven out of some troughs in the past but this time I wonder if I’ve really got it in me to be the shoulder for his grief: this procession of stunning losses, unsupportable, unanswerable.
I have spoken to Tessa in confidence: she is not unsympathetic, but quite resolute, claims (albeit in sorrow) to have seen all this coming, the premonition itself a part of their marital fracture. It’s plain how deep is the gulf between them, one that Steven, clearly, allowed to worsen. He concedes as much. But then, right now he is so miserable I believe he would confess to any unsolved crime going. I’ve heard the slight stammer, noticed the unsteady hand, seen the strain in his smile. The weight on his shoulders is driving him down into the dirt: my guess is that at every turn he’s seeing just how total could be the ruin of his life.
Above all, that unannounced, annihilating call paid on him at Blakedene by James Keaton has left him very, very shaky. I don’t suppose one recovers easily from looking down the barrels of such a hatred. I’ve long held a dim view of Keaton based on what I’ve read in the papers, and Steven’s grim account of the man’s personal/familial failings only stack up the prosecution. But – the plain fact is he’s lost a daughter in odious circumstances, Steven stands accused of clinical negligence, and there is nothing he could say to Keaton’s face that will make a blind bit of difference.
Of course Keaton’s express threat to make Steven’s life ‘hell’, f
ramed in the language of some Sicilian thug, shows the ugly streak in the man, and can’t be dismissed. But, again, I can imagine all too easily Steven offering his neck to the blade. The worst pain for him as far as I can see is that he has no proper outlet for his own misery, is simply not permitted. He had real feelings for that girl, I think – for better or worse, the poor bastard. So he’s already in hell.
The Blakedene board are circling him – he ought to mount a defence of some sort. I have suggested he talk to Christine Rainey at Cruikshank Kearns, who worked so deftly for McKissock’s wife over her unfair dismissal. Steven nods, but he doesn’t hear me, screwed into some fatalistic frame of his own making.
I can’t always see a case for him leaving our house in the morning, but he does, and he will have to run the gauntlet for the foreseeable. Even Tessa was door-stopped and besieged yesterday at 7am, this while dressing the twins for their first day at school. One can’t be sure who sang to the media: I wouldn’t put it past one of the underpaid RMOs of Blakedene. But Steven has muttered about ‘old friends’ of Eloise Keaton’s who could hardly be thought friendly; also some associates of the wretched Leon Worrell, including his own brother. In any case it’s painfully clear that when the svelte blonde daughter of Britain’s ninetieth-richest man dies in violent circumstances, that is a story, a horribly interesting story.
So, raincoated figures loiter outside the Blakedene gates, tramping the perimeter, assailing the dry-stone walls, not far from the spot where Darren Carver’s body was found just over a week ago. The local press have never had such an imbroglio to feast on, and Blakedene, accordingly, is assuming ‘a sinister aspect’. The long-lens news photos are in the classic manner: deserted grounds, blind windows, silently speaking of guilt. I try to keep this stuff away from Steven, not least because they are recycling the same college-era photo of the Keaton girl, her down-in-the-mouth prettiness exacerbating the morbid glamour, the distasteful sideshow, the all-round exploitation of misery.
Naturally the papers are soiling themselves in glee over the ‘star-crossed lovers’ angle, trying to read psychopathic rage in the eyes of Leon Worrell from the one innocuous holiday snap they managed to steal. I admit, were Steven not so dogged in the man’s defence then I would probably draw the same glum conclusion – that this was a lovers’ quarrel, over deep-seated differences, which tipped over into something terrible. (It seems Worrell and the Keaton girl were overheard arguing loudly at dinner in the Cadogan hotel, evidently ‘a domestic’, with overtones of jealousy.)
‘Leon didn’t do this, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, he loved her …’ Steven’s lament. I have tried to tilt the lens this way and that, pushed him to interrogate the basis for his view – which is really no more than his own good nature’s reading of what Eloise Keaton told him in the course of her treatment; and I’m just not certain Steven had his head screwed on and facing straight throughout that process.
But do I know any better? The media version is a hash of innuendo, yes, but I can’t say the hacks are doing much worse with what they’ve got than I or the authorities. I could tell the papers a tale or two, for sure, throw them fresh meat. A former patient of the missing Dr Forrest – also, it seems, an ex-lover – dead, murdered, her name on a list stolen from Robert’s apartment …?
I have a theory, it’s true. Eloise Keaton was killed by the curse of Robert Forrest. Those are the mad fingers playing on my strings. It makes no sense, obviously. Yet the connections are real: what remains obscured is any kind of design.
When I spoke again to Hagen I could hear his own struggle with this latest escalation of morbidity. It’s bedevilling him just as it is me, I know it. But Hagen has other matters to occupy his time, whereas more and more I can think of nothing else.
Eloise links Robert to Leon – she was lover to them both within the same window of months. Could Leon’s rage have been a fit of sexual jealousy? Might he have first taken this out on his rival? Made accomplices, somehow, of Darren Carver, Killian MacCabe …? But the tower just falls, always, at any attempt to add a second tier. Steven is the only sounding board I have, but in his fixed and self-abnegating mindset he is absolutely no use to me.
It is a curse – a plague on both our houses. Steven can’t see it, refuses to see it. And yet now he’s being bedevilled far worse than any of us.
September 25th
Late yesterday Steven got the invitation to his own beheading, and this morning he drove out to face the Blakedene board. Precisely the verdict one expected – ‘in light of recent unfortunate events’, blah, ‘deeply concerned about the standard of his judgement’, blah-blah. With a calculating thrust they do not demand his resignation, but invite him to ‘reflect on his position’. In his diminished state it was only human that he nod mutely, accept their derisory offer of a week or so to ‘reflect’.
This evening we consoled him as best we could. Cal, who’s been a reformed character since his grounding, made me proud by drawing Steven into a conversation over something he’d read about ‘the psychology of being left- or right-wing’, and Steven began to expound somewhat like his old self. I was glad to slip out of conversational duties, frankly, for we have had some more bad news. The great George Garrison, my mentor, is dying. He was poorly a while without diagnosis, at first they thought gallstones, then obstructive jaundice. But nothing was right. The endoscopist went in and all looked murky, so the Ca 19-9 was ordered and the results are horrific: the pancreas a stone, tissues hopelessly fibrotic, pancreatic head a frightening forest, nothing resectable. At 70 years old and Stage 4, George has no truck with radiation, accepts it will be months if not weeks – admits he should have heeded the abdominal pain, the loss of appetite. Muriel is devastated. I must visit them in Harley Street, and do it this week.
I hate to think how shaky I am at the moment, worse that it’s compounded by the goddamned dreams. Last night Edmond called on me once again … and it drained me as much as any lived experience. I seemed to wake and find him stood at our bedroom door, mouth twisted in a sad smile, his eyes dun-coloured and unreadable. I took him downstairs … but soon, sure enough, we were wandering down the strip-lit corridors of the Spire Hospital, then he led me down to the banks of the River Yare at dusk.
‘Death by water,’ he said after a while. ‘So strange, complete, to be swallowed that way. Stolen. Or lost.’
‘But you died so bravely, Edmond.’ I said it and meant it, vehemently. The ghost, however, seemed not to hear me.
‘I wasn’t prepared, Grey, when the moment came. Culpably unprepared. I let myself believe it couldn’t happen. My fault, for so much sadness.’
‘Ed – these accidents, tragedies … they’re not foreseeable.’
‘There are no accidents, Grey.’ He turned toward me fully. ‘The hourglass is turned, the sand runs. We fight it in vain, for the most part. There is a slim chance, though, to change the given – I think – if one is alert. But I couldn’t save Peter.’
‘But you did. Edmond, you saved his life. You were a hero. Peter’s alive.’
He shook his head decidedly. ‘No, Grey, that’s not what happened. I learned, too late. There was something I did, you see. Or something I failed to do. For that I was judged, found guilty, and my son was taken. I had to surrender him, it was … decreed.’
The sheer self-cruelty of his incomprehension was driving me to tears, in the dream – but my eyes were still wet when I forced myself awake, and evidently I’d been groaning in my sleep too, for Olivia was bent over me, with a deeply worried mien. God love her, she pulled my head into her chest, stroked my hair as if I were her boy. And I was too much unmanned to act the stoic. So I told her, about this dream and all the ones before it.
September 26th
I was afraid this day might never end, but it’s 2am now and Steven has limped away to his bed. We had little left to say to each other by then. I don’t know which of us has been more – reduced? – by the events of the day. I feel strain all across my chest muscles, poi
nted pains in my shoulder-blades as if tightened by a screwdriver. But Steven has the look of one who’s been broken, finally, by what we went through tonight, and the grim, grim confession he made to me.
At first light I must try to reach Hagen, as I ought to have done far earlier today. How much do I tell him? The urge to defend my friend is a massive pull. Yet the outcome for Steven might not be as grave as he fears. Clinical negligence, yes, compounded by an awful error of judgement, and that ought to be faced. I’m saddened, by his deceit. But I’ve allowed him to drag me into it too. And I can’t but feel, however obscurely, that I will have to pay. Superstition, dread, these have started to feel like the only fit responses to the hole we’re in. I believe now that nothing will ever surprise me again.
Late in the afternoon Steven rang me, greatly agitated, insisting we meet to talk. He had been rattling round our house, so wrapped up in gloom that I was mistakenly encouraged, rushed to meet him at the earliest feasible moment. His news? Leon Worrell had called his mobile – a nerve-straining occurrence, I assumed. But the man had hotly protested his innocence, asserted the Keaton girl’s death to be murder, some sort of a frame-up into which he’d been fitted, a conspiracy – he used the expression ‘honour killing’. According to him the borrowed Jaguar was run off the road by parties in the employ of ‘the Keaton family’. The police, he insisted, were also in James Keaton’s pocket, and so the investigation would be wilfully blind.
I found this grotesque, told Steven as much. People just don’t do such things, even the likes of Keaton, for all his Little Caesar affectation. And yet Steven remained adamant about Worrell’s absolute integrity. With his bloodshot eyes levelled at me, he insisted ‘we both know’ the police to be inherently prejudiced in these matters. I rated that neither here nor there, rated Steven much too overwrought to make a judgment. Whereupon he threw the thunderbolt: Worrell had urged – begged – Steven to meet with him secretly, in some old cemetery north of Muswell Hill, to fetch him clean clothes, money … A summons, from a fugitive – and Steven had already resolved to comply. His ask of me was not advice but that I be his wingman: he was begging me to go with him. ‘Help me do some good tonight,’ he pleaded. Good grief … I couldn’t have made my disapproval clearer: ‘Steven, how can you ask me this? Can you not see the wrongness of it?’ But he saw no such thing.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 20
