Lasting Damage

Chapter 4

17/07/10



Charlie didn’t know what to do about her surname. It hadn’t occurred to her that it was an issue until Simon had brought it up at the airport. He’d nodded at her passport and said, ‘I suppose you’ll have to get a new one now.’ She hadn’t known what he’d meant, and must have done a dismal job of concealing her shock when he’d explained. Simon had laughed at her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I assumed you’d be changing your name to mine, but if you don’t want to, I don’t mind.’

‘Really?’ Charlie had asked, immediately anxious about his happiness, which she perceived as fragile and endangered at the best of times. She had assumed the opposite: that she would remain Charlie Zailer; frankly, she was amazed Simon hadn’t also. Annoyed with herself for being unprepared for such an important discussion, she’d decided on the spot that she would do whatever he wanted. There were worse names than Waterhouse.

It seemed, though, that for once Simon’s feelings were uncomplicated. ‘Really,’ he’d assured her. ‘What does it matter what you’re called? It’s only a label, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly,’ she’d replied, straight-faced. ‘I mean, thinking about it, I could just be called Female Police Sergeant number 54,437, couldn’t I?’

The matter of her surname had been preoccupying her ever since. What did other married women do? Charlie’s next-door neighbour Marion Gregory, Kate Kombothekra, Stacey Sellers, Debbie Gibbs – they had all changed their names. Olivia, Charlie’s sister, who was getting married next year, was trying to persuade Dominic, her husband-to-be, that they should become the Zailer-Lunds. ‘Or he can stay as he is, and I’ll be Zailer-Lund on my own,’ she’d told Charlie defiantly. ‘If Dom wants to wrap himself in the mouldering fetters of outmoded tradition, that’s up to him. He can’t stop me from adopting a more progressive approach.’ Knowing Olivia as she did, Charlie suspected her determination had less to do with principle and more to do with a desire to be double-barrelled.

Charlie Zailer-Waterhouse. No, it was out of the question. Unlike Liv, Charlie did not hanker after the trappings of aristocracy; a double-barrelled surname would be an embarrassment to her, as well as an opportunity for everyone at the nick to take the piss.

‘Why don’t we pick a new name?’ she called out to Simon, who was in the pool – or, rather, on it, lying in an inflatable boat that they’d found bobbing on the surface when they arrived. His arms and legs trailed in the water as he drifted aimlessly. Sometimes he used his hands as oars to turn himself round or push himself along; once or twice he’d kicked back from the edge, to see if he could propel himself all the way to the other side. He couldn’t; the pool was too big.

Charlie had been secretly watching him, pretending to read her book, for nearly an hour and a half. What was going on in his mind? ‘Simon?’

‘Hm?’

‘You’re miles away.’

‘Did you say something?’

‘Instead of me taking your name, why don’t we choose a new one? For both of us.’

‘Don’t be daft. No one does that.’

‘Charlie and Simon Herrera.’

‘Isn’t that Domingo’s surname?’

‘Exactly. We could start a new tradition: the first person you meet on your honeymoon, their surname becomes your married name.’ Domingo was the villa’s caretaker: a young muscly chain-smoker with a deep tan, who spoke little English and appeared to live in a small wooden chalet-style building at the far end of the garden. He had picked Simon and Charlie up at the airport and driven them to Los Delfines, then given them a tour of the house and grounds without asking – perhaps because he lacked the vocabulary – whether they would prefer to wait until morning. The tour had taken nearly an hour; Domingo had insisted on stopping in front of every appliance and pointing at it, before demonstrating, in total silence, how it ought to be used.

Charlie hadn’t cared. She had walked through the wooden gate set into the high, pantile-topped white wall, smelled the warm, spicy air in the garden, seen the pool lit up like an enormous glowing aquamarine stone, and fallen in love with Los Delfines on the spot. If she had to watch Domingo mime the turning of keys in front of keyholes and the setting and unsetting of the burglar alarm in order to be allowed to stay here for a fortnight, it was a price she was more than happy to pay.

Everything about this place was perfect. So perfect that it made Charlie worry about herself and Simon in comparison. What if the only thing wrong was them? She knew it was stupid to compare oneself with other people – to compare herself and Simon with other married couples – but it was hard to avoid doing so. Charlie knew of no other newlyweds who had approached their honeymoon in the way ex-mobsters-turned-informers might approach entry into the witness protection programme. Kathleen, Simon’s mother, was as terrified of flying as she was of most things in life, and wouldn’t have been able to cope with the thought of her son getting on a plane, so Simon had told her he and Charlie were going to Torquay for their honeymoon – by train. Kathleen had asked where they were staying, in case she needed to contact him in an emergency. He could have named a hotel in Torquay, real or imaginary, but he knew Kathleen would try to reach him there within a couple of days and discover he’d lied, which had left him with no alternative but to refuse to tell her. ‘There won’t be an emergency,’ he’d said firmly. ‘And if there is, it’ll have to wait.’

Kathleen had sulked, wept, begged. At one point, after one of her trademark soggy Sunday lunches, she had fallen to her knees and grabbed Simon’s legs. He’d had to pull her off him. Charlie had been shocked, as much by Simon’s apparent lack of surprise as by anything else. Michael, his dad, hadn’t seemed surprised either. His only verbal contribution had been the occasional muttered, ‘Please, son,’ to Simon. Please, son, give her a way of contacting you. Make my life easier.

To Charlie’s great relief, Simon had stood firm. To her utter bafflement, he had accepted an invitation to lunch at his parents’ house the following Sunday. ‘Are you mental?’ Charlie had snapped at him. ‘It’ll happen again – exactly what happened last week.’ Simon had shrugged and said, ‘Then I’ll walk out like I did last week.’

He liked to believe that his mother didn’t control him, but then he did things like insist they go all the way to Torquay to get married – ‘to make the lie a bit more true,’ he’d said, unwilling to acknowledge the irrationality. Charlie would have preferred to get married at Spilling Register Office; she hated the thought that anything about their wedding was dictated by her pathetic mother-in-law. Simon had shouted her down: ‘I thought you loved Torquay. Isn’t that why we’re pretending to go there for our honeymoon?’

Oddly enough, Kathleen hadn’t tried to impose a church wedding on them, as Charlie had feared she might. She’d voiced no objection when Simon had told her that the wedding would involve only himself, Charlie and two witnesses, neither of whom would be her. ‘She’s relieved,’ he’d explained. ‘Nothing’s expected of her. Think about it: most weddings, the mother of the groom spends the best part of a day being friendly and welcoming to the guests. Mum’d never have managed it. There’d have been a sudden illness, and Dad would have had to stay at home and look after her.’

Charlie’s parents had also been thankful to hear that their attendance wouldn’t be required. Her father would rather play golf than do anything else. He’d have taken a day off, for Charlie’s sake, and tried to enjoy her wedding, but he’d soon have found an excuse to sink into a foul mood. Any day that involved no golf was a disastrous day for Howard Zailer, and for all those unlucky enough to encounter him in his golfless state.

‘What about Melville?’ Simon shouted from the swimming pool.

‘Hm?’

‘Our new surname.’

‘Why Melville?’

‘As in Herman Melville.’

‘What about Dick?’

Simon stuck two fingers up at her. Moby Dick was his favourite novel. He read it once a year. He’d brought it with him to Spain; it was supposed to be his honeymoon reading, so why wasn’t he reading it? Why was he content to float aimlessly, as if there was nothing else he wanted to do? The leaves and petals on the pool’s surface looked as if they were making more of an effort.

Why wasn’t he having sex with his wife?

Weren’t you supposed to spend most of your honeymoon in bed? Or was that only if you hadn’t slept together before the wedding?

Charlie sighed. Was she expecting too much? After years of avoiding all physical contact with her, Simon had decided last year that it was time they consummated their relationship. Since then, everything had been fine. Well, fine-ish. Charlie still didn’t dare make the first move; she sensed Simon wouldn’t like it. It was equally clear that talking – during, immediately afterwards, or on the subject of – was forbidden. Or was Charlie imagining barriers that weren’t there? Maybe Simon wanted nothing more than for her to say, ‘Do you like having sex with me, or do you only do it because you feel you have to?’ Physically it seemed to work for him, but he always seemed so removed – eyes closed, silent, almost robotic at times.

The mid-afternoon sun was scorching. Charlie considered telling Simon to go inside and put on more sun-cream. And then she could go in after him and . . . No. The rule of never initiating sex was a good one, and she was determined to stick to it. Once – years ago at a party, long before they were officially together – Simon had rejected her advances in a particularly brutal way. Charlie was determined never to allow it to happen again.

She heard a noise behind her – footsteps. Domingo. She tensed, then exhaled with relief when she saw that he was holding a rake and a hoe; he was here to work, that was all. The garden that surrounded Los Delfines on all sides was evidently somebody’s pride and joy – perhaps Domingo’s, perhaps the owners’. It was bursting with more colours than Charlie had ever seen together in one place before: flame red, burgundy, purple, lilac, royal blue, orange, yellow, every shade of green. It made most English gardens look anaemic. Charlie’s favourite thing in it was what she thought of as ‘the upside-down lily tree’, from which white lilies hung like little lampshades.

She put down her book and headed for the pool. Not because she wanted to be closer to Simon, but because the heat was blistering and she needed to cool off. She walked down the marble Roman steps into the water. ‘Exactly the right temperature,’ she said. ‘Not cold, but not warm. Like a hot bath someone ran two hours ago.’

Simon didn’t reply.

‘Simon?’ What was he so focused on, that he couldn’t hear her when she was right next to him?

‘Hm? Sorry. What did you say?’

It was hardly worth repeating. It seemed a shame to waste this opportunity; she ought to say something more important while she had his attention. ‘Every time I see Domingo heading in our direction, I panic.’

‘Scared he’s going to try and show us some more light switches?’

‘No, it’s not that, it’s . . . His mobile number’s on the website. That means we’re contactable via him, doesn’t it?’

Simon struggled to sit up in his boat. ‘Are you worried about my mum? She doesn’t know where we are. No one does.’

‘Olivia does.’ Would he be angry that she’d told her sister what was supposed to be their secret? Apparently not. Charlie battled against the urge to ask him if she had his full attention. ‘When I told Liv how much this place cost, she insisted on seeing pictures. I had to show her the website.’

‘She’s not going to tell my mum, is she?’

‘It’s not Kathleen I’m worried about,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s work.’

Simon made a dismissive noise. ‘The Safer Communities Forum can manage without you for fourteen days.’

‘I mean your work. No one cares if I’m not there.’

‘What, the Snowman? After months of looking forward to his Waterhouse sabbatical, as he calls it? He’s hardly going to seek me out. You know the last thing he said to me before I left? “Let’s both make the most of our two weeks off, Waterhouse. I might not be going anywhere more exotic than my office and the canteen, but without your constant plaguing presence wherever I turn, I shall be on holiday in my heart.” ’

‘Believe me, Proust can’t wait for you to get back. He’s counting the days.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Simon warned her. He hated the idea that his DI might feel anything but loathing for him.

‘We left Liv and Gibbs alone together,’ said Charlie. ‘What if Liv got even more pissed than she was already and told Gibbs, and what if . . . ?’ She didn’t want to put it into words, in case that would make it more likely to come true.

‘Gibbs?’ Simon laughed. ‘Gibbs makes no effort to speak to me when I’m sitting next to him. He’s not going to go to the trouble of tracking me down in Spain. Why would he?’

‘All it would take would be for something a bit less mundane than usual to come up at work, and everyone would think, “If only Simon were here, if only we could ask him what he thinks . . .” ’

‘No, they wouldn’t. They’d think, “Thank God Waterhouse isn’t here to over-complicate things.” ’

‘You know that’s not true. Sam Kombothekra doesn’t think like that. And if Gibbs—’

‘For f*ck’s sake, Charlie! Olivia isn’t going to tell Gibbs where we are, Gibbs isn’t going to tell Sam, Sam isn’t going to stumble over a problem in the next fortnight that he needs to talk to me about. Okay? Relax.’

He was right; it was unlikely they’d be disturbed by anyone from home. So why couldn’t Charlie shift the anxiety that was taking up space in her lungs, space she needed for breathing?

‘I’m all yours for a fortnight, so count yourself unlucky,’ said Simon. ‘What’s that Mark Twain quote? “I’ve worried about thousands of things in my life, a few of which have actually happened.” Or words to that effect. Look.’ He pointed to the gap between two trees, to a large mountain in the distance.

‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’ Charlie asked.

‘The mountain. See the face?’

‘The mountain face?’

‘No, an actual face. It looks like it’s got a face.’

‘I can’t see anything. What, you mean like eyes, nose, mouth?’

‘And eyebrows, and I can see an ear, I think. Can’t you see it?’

‘No.’ Charlie tried not to sound cross. ‘I can’t see a face in the mountain. Is it attractive?’

‘It’s got to be a trick of the light, but . . . I wonder whether it’ll change as the sun moves. It must be something to do with the shadows cast by the rocky ridges.’

Charlie stared for a long time, but no face made itself apparent to her. Stupidly, she felt left out. Simon and his boat had floated to the other side of the pool. Might as well do a few lengths, she decided, keep herself fit. She resolved not to panic from now on when she saw Domingo coming her way, even if she did have a startlingly clear image in her mind of him ambushing her and Simon with the words, ‘Phone, England,’ waving his mobile in the air.

‘Charlie?’

‘Mm?’

‘What would you do if . . . ?’ Simon shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘What would I do if what?’

‘Never mind. Forget it.’

‘I can’t forget it, and you know I can’t,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Tell me!’

What would you do if I asked you for a divorce? What would you do if I said I wanted us to sleep in separate rooms?

‘I’m imagining bad things here. Do you want to put me out of my misery?’

‘It’s nothing bad,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you and me.’

Meaning that if it was something relating to the two of them it would, by necessity, be bad?

Stop creating problems where none exist, Zailer.

Charlie swore under her breath. She knew she was about to spend at least the next two hours trying to make him tell her, and she knew she would fail.



‘You’ve got to go,’ Olivia told Gibbs, pressing her hands against his ribcage. For the past hour she’d been trying to push him out of her bed, but he was stronger than she was, and resisting.

‘No, I haven’t.’ He was lying on his back, arms folded behind his head.

‘Yes, you have! We’ve got to start pretending not to be wicked Godless degenerates. If we start now, it won’t take too long for it to become convincing – we might believe it by this evening if we’re lucky.’ Gibbs almost smiled, but didn’t move. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, according to Olivia’s phone. Her hotel room was as dark as it had been when they’d stumbled in here twelve hours ago. The black-out blinds and thick curtains were more serious about the preservation of night than any window-dressings Olivia had ever previously encountered, and had joined forces against the daylight.

‘Don’t you have to get home at some point? Haven’t you got a life, plans, a curfew? I’ve got all three.’ She gave up pushing. It wasn’t going to work, and it was hurting her hands.

Gibbs rolled onto his side so that he was facing her. It was funny: though she called him Chris, she could only think of him as Gibbs, which was what Simon called him. Would that change? Silently, she reprimanded herself for thinking about him in the future tense. She needed to pull herself together, but how could she, with him lying next to her, radiating heat?

‘Trying to get rid of me?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but . . . not in a bad way.’

‘Is there a good way?’

‘Of course. There are loads. There’s the self-sacrificing “cut me loose and save yourself while you still can” good way, and there’s . . .’ Olivia stopped, remembering that he’d compared her to a Sunday colour supplement, and his reason for doing so. ‘We’ve got to be out by three o’clock,’ she said briskly, to disguise her embarrassment. ‘I can’t ring and ask for another extension.’

‘What are the other good ways?’ Gibbs asked. Could he really be interested?

She couldn’t tell him the truth. She’d just had sex with him, three times. If ever a situation called for the opposite of the truth, this was surely it.

‘I’m going nowhere unless you tell me,’ he threatened.

‘For God’s sake! All right, then, maybe this’ll do the trick where trying to push you out of bed failed. Another good way is: I need you to go so that I can spend the rest of the day thinking obsessively about all aspects of you, and going over your every word and action in my mind, to the exclusion of all else, for the foreseeable future.’

Gibbs grinned. ‘It’ll be easier for you to think about me if I stay here.’

‘Wrong. For as long as you’re here, I’ll be too busy wondering what you’re thinking to do any thinking myself.’

‘I’m not thinking anything, apart from I want to f*ck you again, but I’m too knackered.’

‘Not listening, not listening!’ Olivia covered her ears with her hands. ‘Stop adding more words to the ones I already have to think about. I need to deal with the backlog. Don’t laugh – I’m being serious. Please just go. Don’t say anything else.’

‘So that you can think about me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And about nothing else?’

‘Not until I’ve cleared the backlog, no.’

Gibbs nodded as if her request were entirely reasonable. He sat up and started gathering his clothes together. Olivia looked at her phone again. Five past two. She felt excitement welling up inside her at the prospect of him leaving. There were things she needed to attend to, urgently. First on the agenda was the letting off of steam in an undignified manner: running in circles round the room screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ Second was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the door and studying her face and body as if she’d never seen them before and never would again; trying to see them as Gibbs saw them, through his eyes. Then she would ring Charlie. Or rather, she would ring the caretaker at Los Delfines, the one whose number was on the website, and ask him to pass on a message for Charlie to ring her. Any decent sister – and Charlie was, generally – would want to hear this sort of news straight away.

Guess who’s been a complete and utter slapper? Me!

Some gossip was so momentous that it demolished all considerations of honeymoon privacy that stood in its path; by pure chance, this was exactly such an instance. Olivia knew she would enjoy gossiping about herself as much as she enjoyed gossiping about other people. More, even. She so rarely did anything that would shock anyone. How refreshing, to be a scandal-maker at her age – to do something indescribably stupid when, in forty-one years, no one had ever feared she might.

Could she ask Charlie not to tell Simon? Some people kept no secrets from their spouses. Would her sister become fanatical about sharing everything, now that she was married? Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on. He would feel that in some obscure way, his and Charlie’s wedding day had been ruined, degraded, by their two witnesses ending up in bed together.

Olivia sighed as she realised the implications. For Simon’s sake, Charlie would have to be livid and wounded. She wouldn’t see Olivia’s one-night stand with Gibbs as something that had happened to Olivia, but as something bad that had happened to her all-important husband. Perhaps she would also object on her own account, and accuse Olivia of trespassing; Gibbs was police, and therefore belonged to Charlie and Simon, and not to Olivia, who’d had no right to barge in to a world that wasn’t hers, into which she was only invited from time to time, at Charlie’s discretion.

Had she hijacked the most important day of her sister’s life? Was it unforgivable to cast oneself as a rival leading lady without consulting anybody, when one was supposed to be playing a supporting role? Olivia couldn’t decide whether she’d done a terrible thing to Charlie, or nothing at all. She would never know, unless she told Charlie what had happened; she couldn’t work it out on her own, not without knowing what the reaction would be.

I ought to be feeling guilty about Dom, she thought, and about Debbie Gibbs. They’re the wronged parties here.

Gibbs was dressed. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘You can start thinking.’

‘So can you,’ said Olivia, wanting a way of attaching him to her, now that he was going. ‘Think about me, I mean.’

‘To the exclusion of all else,’ he said. ‘For the foreseeable future.’

It sounded like a quote. Because it was, Olivia realised. He was quoting her.





Sam Kombothekra wasn’t used to feeling guilty, but that was how he felt as he sat at a window table in Chompers café bar, waiting for Alice Bean. This was – or would be, assuming she turned up – an entirely unnecessary meeting, yet Sam had chosen it in preference to an afternoon at home with his family. He already knew the answers Alice would give to the questions he planned to ask her. He could have asked them over the phone, but he’d been keen to see her in the flesh, keener than he cared to admit even to himself. Few women were more legendary than Alice in the small world that was Spilling nick. Sam had heard from at least ten different sources that Simon Waterhouse had been romantically fixated on her several years ago. She’d been Alice Fancourt then.

Sam knew that her involvement with Simon (which, according to Colin Sellers, had been ‘a shagless waste of time’) had ended badly, that the two of them no longer spoke to one another. How much of the story would Alice tell him today? On the phone this morning, she had asked within seconds of Sam introducing himself if he worked with Simon. She’d suggested Chompers as the venue for this afternoon’s meeting, saying, ‘That’s where Simon and I always met.’ Sam felt guilty about that too: not only was he abandoning his family on one of his days off, he would also very probably be stirring up painful memories for a stranger, for no more noble reason than to satisfy his unwholesome curiosity.

He looked at his watch. She was ten minutes late. Should he ring her? No, he’d leave it until quarter past. Maybe he’d ask one of the waiters to turn down the music. Presumably it was intended to cover the noise from the corner of the room, where there was a fenced-off play area full of howling soggy-faced toddlers, a handful of mothers whose stiff smiles sizzled with repressed fury, tables and chairs in the shape of toadstools, and an assortment of unrecognisable plastic objects in primary colours. Sam didn’t blame the children for wailing; he might soon be doing the same if he had to sit through many more Def Leppard hits from the 1980s.

He stared out of the window at the car park. Any second now, Alice would pull into one of the empty spaces. This might be her, slamming shut the boot of a red Renault Clio. Sunglasses, strappy sandals . . . No. Simon would never fall for a face like that. Sam wondered if Alice looked anything like Charlie. So what if she does? And so what if she doesn’t? Why did he find everything to do with Simon so compelling? He wouldn’t have put himself out to meet a woman Chris Gibbs used to be in love with, or Colin Sellers. Come to think of it, he would probably travel a reasonable distance to see the rare woman that didn’t inspire longing in Colin, assuming such a person existed.

Ashamed of his own prurience, Sam tried to focus instead on Connie Bowskill. He soon found himself thinking about Simon Waterhouse again. Nothing wrong with that, he decided, not in this context. Simon was the best detective Sam knew; he was the best detective anyone knew, though most people were reluctant to admit it, and preferred to dismiss him as a rude, unpredictable troublemaker. On the first of January this year, at five past midnight, Sam had made a resolution: instead of constantly feeling inferior to Simon, and allowing more and more resentment to build, he would try to learn from him, to put aside his ego and see if he could acquire by imitation – by studying Simon’s behaviour and attitudes as if he might one day be examined on both – a small fraction of that brilliance.

Simon would not have dismissed Connie Bowskill in a hurry, Sam was certain of that. Would he have believed her, though? In Sam’s position, having met Connie and heard what she had to say, would Simon be leaning more towards thinking she was suffering from stress and seeing things that weren’t there, or would he be convinced she was lying? Maybe he’d think her story’s implausibility made it likely to be true, because few people would have the confidence to tell so outrageous a lie.

You’re not Simon – that’s the whole problem. You’ve no idea what he’d think.

No, that wasn’t true. You couldn’t work closely with someone for years and not have an inkling as to how their mind worked. Simon would think there was at least a chance that a crime had been committed. If he’d gone with Sam to talk to the Bowskills this morning, he’d have come away certain that there was something badly wrong in that house – Melrose Cottage, not 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. Sam agreed, in so far as one can agree with one’s imaginary projection of an absent person. Something was going on: Connie and Kit Bowskill hadn’t told him everything, not by a long way. He’d overheard enough of the conversation he wasn’t supposed to hear to be sure that they were conspiring to hide something from him.

The idea of somebody putting an image of a dead body on an estate agent’s website was laughable. Beyond crazy. In his mind, Sam heard Simon say, ‘Crazy doesn’t have to mean made up. Insanity’s as real as sanity. It doesn’t need our understanding in order to f*ck up and end lives – it only needs to understand itself. Sometimes it doesn’t even need that.’ Immediately, Sam wished he hadn’t remembered the comment; with it came the memory of yet another instance of Simon being proved right and him wrong, despite his more sensible belief in what had seemed so much more likely.

He sighed. As Simon’s temporary stand-in, he would do everything he could to find a dead woman that he didn’t believe in – a woman in a green and lilac dress. He’d already put in a call to Cambridge police and made it clear to them that he expected them to take action, once they’d stopped laughing.

‘Sam?’

He looked up and saw a woman with cropped peroxide blonde hair, maroon plastic-framed glasses and shiny London-bus-red lipstick. She was wearing a long pink sleeveless dress and flat gold sandals, carrying a bag with holes in it that looked as if it was made from lots of offcuts of rope knotted together; the holes were a design feature, not the result of wear and tear, and enabled Sam to see some of the bag’s contents: a red wallet, an envelope, some keys.

‘Alice Bean.’ She smiled and held out her hand. ‘You have no idea how weird this is for me. I haven’t set foot in this place for nearly seven years. If I have a funny turn, you’ll know why.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Sam asked, shaking her hand.

‘Lime cordial and lemonade would be lovely. Lots of ice. I know it’s a kid’s drink, but in this heat, nothing else will do. I must have sweated at least a pint in the car on the way here.’

Sam watched her out of the corner of his eye as he queued at the bar. She was undeniably pretty, but the hair had surprised him – its shortness and its colour. And the maroon glasses, and the lipstick most of all. He wouldn’t have thought Simon would . . . But that was assuming she’d looked the same seven years ago, and that Simon’s taste in women would be easy to predict. Why should it be, when nothing else about him was? He’d proposed marriage to Charlie when she wasn’t even his girlfriend.

‘So Connie gave you my number?’ Alice said as Sam put her drink down on the table in front of her.

‘She didn’t. I didn’t ask her for it. I looked you up in the Yellow Pages, under “Alternative Health – Homeopaths”. There were no Alice Fancourts, but I figured Alice Bean might work, and it did.’

‘Bean’s my maiden name. I haven’t been Fancourt for years.’

‘Do you normally work Saturdays?’

‘No. I wasn’t working today. I popped into the centre to pick up a remedy for my daughter, Florence, who’s got a tummy bug. You were lucky to catch me. And I hope you don’t catch the bug, but you might, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I had it before Florence and everyone at work had it before me. It’s a spreader, that’s for sure. Passes out of your system quickly, though, on the plus side. Twenty-four hours of vomiting and diarrhoea and then it moves on to the next poor sucker.’

Great. Something to look forward to.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Sam told her. ‘If your daughter’s ill.’

‘She’ll be fine. She’s with my friend Briony, who’s like a second mum to her. Keep me as long as you like. I promise not to make it hard for you by asking awkward questions.’

Sam tried not to look surprised. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one with the questions? ‘Like what?’ he said.

‘About Simon. He wouldn’t want you to talk about him to me – I know he wouldn’t.’ Alice reached into her bag, pulled out the envelope Sam had seen through the holes, and held it out for him to take. He saw Simon’s name on the front in blue handwriting, underlined. ‘Could you give him this?’

Sam was aware of not wanting to take it from her, but couldn’t think why at first. Then his brain caught up with his gut. No thanks. Whatever the drama was, he didn’t want even a minor role. His hands stayed where they were, wrapped round his coffee mug. Eventually Alice put the envelope back in her bag, and he felt petty and self-important, knowing that he’d turned the focus from her and Simon to himself and his scruples; he wished he’d taken the damn thing. Ought he to tell her Simon got married yesterday, that he was on his honeymoon? Did it make it worse that it had happened only yesterday? Sam didn’t think it should make a difference, but felt that it did, somehow.

He opened his mouth to try and explain why he didn’t think it was a good idea for him to act as go-between, but Alice talked over him, smiling to show she wasn’t offended. ‘What did you want to ask me about Connie? Is she okay?’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

‘I see her once a fortnight. The last time was . . . Hang on, I can tell you exactly.’ She pulled a small pink diary out of her miniature fisherman’s net. ‘Last Monday, four o’clock.’

‘As in the one just gone? Monday 12 July?’

Alice nodded.

‘Since then, have you spoken to her on the phone? Emailed or texted her?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘And she didn’t ring you in the early hours of this morning?’

Alice looked worried. She leaned forward. ‘No. Why? Has something happened?’

‘She’s fine, as far as I can tell,’ said Sam. He wasn’t prepared to say more than that.

‘Why the early hours of this morning?’ Alice persisted. ‘Why did you ask that?’

Because that was when a dead woman appeared on her computer screen, and then disappeared. And she told me you’d recommended she contact Simon Waterhouse, who would believe the unbelievable, if it were true. Except that you couldn’t have recommended him at two this morning, because Alice didn’t ring you then. She hasn’t spoken to you since seeing the woman’s body. Unless she lied about when she saw it.

‘Did you advise Connie to speak to Simon?’ Sam asked.

‘I can’t really discuss what I say to my patients or what they say to me. Sorry.’

‘I’m not asking you to tell me anything Connie hasn’t told me herself. She said you recommended Simon as being unlike any other detective, willing to believe what most people would find implausible.’

Alice nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s what I said, almost word for word.’

‘Would I be right in thinking, then – and I’m not asking for details – that Connie was in some kind of . . . situation, or had a problem, and was worried that no one would believe her?’

‘I really can’t go into the specifics, but . . . Connie came to see me initially because she’d had a shock – she didn’t want to believe that something was the case, and yet she feared it was.’

‘When was this?’ Sam asked.

‘January, so . . . six months ago.’

‘And you told her to go to Simon? Was there a criminal angle, then?’

Alice frowned as she considered it. ‘There was no evidence of anything illegal, but . . . Connie thought there might have been a crime involved, yes. But at the same time, she feared she was mad for thinking it.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I honestly had no idea. All I knew was that being psychologically and emotionally split in two was doing her no good whatsoever. I thought that if she spoke to Simon, he could find out for her one way or the other.’

‘Whether a crime had been committed?’

Alice smiled. ‘I realise there’s no great master list headed “All the crimes that have been committed ever”, but this particular crime would have been documented. Simon could have tracked down the evidence of it in a way that Connie couldn’t.’

‘Do you remember when you first mentioned his name to her?’ Sam asked.

‘Oh, not straight away. About a month ago, six weeks maybe. I tried to help her myself first, obviously, as I do with all my patients, but nothing I said or did seemed to work with Connie. If anything, she started to feel worse as time went on. That was when I realised she might need more than Anacardium or Medorrhinum. Sorry, they’re homeopathic remedies – I forget sometimes that not everyone’s as familiar with them as I am.’

‘Did Connie take your advice?’ Sam asked. ‘Did she share her problem with Simon?’ Was that why he took two days off a couple of weeks ago? He’d mumbled something vague about ‘wedding preparations’, not making eye-contact. At the time, Sam had put it down to embarrassment; Simon was undoubtedly, if inexplicably, mortified to be in a relationship, and avoided referring to his attached status.

Alice looked apologetic. ‘Ask Connie,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’ll tell you the whole story, if you’re willing to listen sympathetically.’

‘Did her unlikely-sounding and possibly criminal problem involve a virtual tour of a house on a property website?’ Sam asked. Alice’s facial expression was the only answer he needed: she didn’t know what he was talking about.

So Connie Bowskill had two impossible-to-believe problems, one since January and one since thirteen hours ago. Interesting.

Impossible to believe.

‘Did you advise Connie to talk to Simon because you genuinely believed she needed police help, or because you hoped he would contact you to ask about her?’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he’d overstepped the mark. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘That’s a question I have no right to ask. Ignore it.’

‘Why, when it’s one I can answer freely?’ said Alice. ‘I genuinely believed Simon ought to hear about Connie’s problem, because . . . well, because it was so odd, so unusual. It was either something truly horrible or nothing at all. I . . .’ She stopped, stared down at the table. Sam was starting to wonder if he ought to prompt her when she said, ‘I’ve only just this second realised it, but I told her to speak to Simon because that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to talk to him about it. He and I haven’t spoken since 2003, and – this, Connie’s . . . issue that she had, made me want to be in touch with him again more than anything else ever has. It made me miss him, though I never really knew him in the first place. Oh, it’s crazy! The funny thing is, I’ve always known absolutely for sure that one day he’d reappear in my life. And when you rang this morning . . .’ She shook her head, looking past Sam out of the window.

He could guess what was coming next. When he’d rung this morning and asked her to meet him, she’d given her sick daughter to a friend and devoted the next two hours to writing the letter she’d wanted to write for the last seven years, the one Sam had refused to deliver.

‘Look, I’m sorry about—’

‘Don’t be,’ said Alice. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to turn you into the very-likely-to-get-shot messenger. It was unethical. And unnecessary – I don’t need you. I know where Simon works – I could post the letter to him. I won’t, though.’ She nodded, as if to formalise the decision. ‘I’m a firm believer in fate, and today fate’s made it clear to me that now’s not the right time. I bet you’re not used to thinking of yourself as an agent of fate, are you?’ She grinned.

‘I’m not.’ Colin Sellers would have had a jokey response ready, but Sam couldn’t think of one.

Alice closed her eyes and took a sip of her drink. ‘The right time will come,’ she said.