Back at her desk, Laura was still smarting from the rebuke Greg had given her; she couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d have been as keen to defend Dr Taylor if she’d been old and fat. He made her so angry sometimes she could spit feathers. He had the ability to bring out the best and worst in her, and more often than not, her plain bitchy self. She sighed bitterly. She should never have slept with him. The moment it was over she knew he regretted it. He couldn’t even look her in the eye. For her, that had been more than humiliation, as she had really liked him. Over the last six months she had tried to show him that it didn’t matter, that she hadn’t expected it to go anywhere, and wasn’t expecting a Mills & Boon ending; she would have been fine with that if he’d at least had the decency to acknowledge it had happened in the first place.
Laura breathed deeply, trying to calm herself. He’d used her for sexual gratification and that was something she had done her best to forgive. Well, no more. She was done with trying to win him over. Instead she would show him what she was capable of. If nothing else, she would prove Dr Taylor was a madwoman. And then she would move on. She felt a tightening in her throat as she remembered the way he had kissed her and the sickness she had felt when he avoided looking at her afterwards. She was a fool. Well, she had learned her lesson. She would never let her guard down again. A valuable lesson indeed. She just thanked her stars that Greg was completely unaware of how very close she’d been to declaring her feelings, which thankfully were now gone. Her career was all that mattered now.
Chapter eleven
The hammering on the front door woke her from her alcohol-induced sleep. She hoisted her heavy head off the cushion and willed her stubborn eyelids to open. It was daylight, but the lamps in her living room were still on. Her sodden clothes lay strewn across the carpet where she’d left them, and an empty bottle of vodka rolled off her stomach as she crawled out of the makeshift bed.
‘I’ll be there in a sec,’ she hollered, grabbing the cushion and duvet off the floor and shoving them behind the sofa.
In the mirror in the hallway she saw her ravaged face. Panda eyes stared back at her from where her mascara had run the night before in the shower. She looked an utter mess and would probably have been unrecognisable even to those who knew her.
She opened the door and peered through a crack.
The police officer from the night before was standing there wearing the same suit with a different shirt and clean tie.
‘Can I come in?’
She backed away from the door and let him follow her into the living room. She made no attempt to pick up her wet clothes or hide the evidence of her drinking. Let him think what he liked. Everyone else did, she reasoned. Why should he be any different? ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked.
‘Please.’
She left him alone, and while the kettle boiled she washed her face and combed her hair. When she returned he had his back to her, standing at the window, and she saw his brown hair was more like auburn in natural light. Very few men visited her apartment and she wondered if he found it too stark.
‘What a fantastic spot,’ he said. ‘You can literally step outside and row down the Avon. I envy you.’
‘I usually run along it, which is pretty special I suppose.’
Her apartment was situated on the south bank of the river Avon, which was the other reason she had chosen to buy it, that and the fact that the grounds were only accessible to other residents, and security was stringent. He had no doubt been able to gain direct access to her front door only because he was a policeman.
A black fur rug and chrome and glass coffee table separated twin brown leather sofas. Silver dome floor lamps stood tall before curving gracefully over each of the sofas, and a third lamp, with a burgundy thread shade, was placed in a corner. There were no ornaments except for two Waterford crystal vases, empty of flowers, on the slim sideboard, and a large piece of driftwood, dried to a silvery grey, set between them.
She had allowed Patrick to guide her in her choice of décor, and had grown to like the room’s sparseness until she saw Greg Turner standing next to the clean furnishings. There was an earthiness about him that suggested he would be more at home surrounded by wooden objects and tactile materials. In her mind she saw him with dirty hands, preparing a large coal fire, a dog dozing next to the hearth, which raised its head dopily, in hope of being patted.
She shook her head, despairing of her fanciful notions. He was a policeman in her home, wearing an ordinary suit and tie, and she had put him in different places because of the colour of his hair and the fact that he didn’t suit the room. In truth, very few people did, unless they were wearing sharp suits or cocktail dresses. She now saw it as cold – calculatingly chic – somewhere you didn’t drop crumbs or throw off your shoes.
‘How are you today?’ he asked, turning to face her.
‘I feel as if my brain has been in a blender. It hurts to move my head.’
He smiled sympathetically. ‘Try Resolve – I find that to be the best remedy, but you’re the doctor so I’m sure you know what’s best.’
‘A nice saline drip is what I give to most of my patients. A couple of paracetamol will have to do for me. Have you been working all night?’
‘And all morning and afternoon as well,’ he replied. He saw the surprise on her face. ‘It’s a quarter to four.’
Alex was shocked. She had lain in her makeshift bed for nearly ten hours. She’d returned home after touring the theatres just after five, found her way into the living room, and tucked herself against the wall with the remains of a bottle of vodka. She had thought that it was still morning. In another five hours she would be back at work. She would have to face the music; to apologise for leaving Nathan Bell to pick up the pieces, for disrupting the department, for causing a complete fuck-up. Again.
‘I’ve just spoken to the coroner. I have the PM prelims back. Still waiting on toxicology and other results, but he’s given me enough to be going on with.’
She inhaled deeply, waiting to hear the outcome.
‘He thinks it was self-induced abortion.’
Alex sank down onto her couch. She had been so sure, so convinced that her attacker had been responsible. She took a shaky breath, and tried to get her head around this revelation. ‘Why do they think it was self-induced?’
Greg Turner shook his head. ‘They’re not ruling anything out yet, but the findings are leaning that way. Her fingerprints are on the instrument.’
‘What instrument?’
‘She tried to keep it medical. There’s the possibility that she may have collapsed while doing it to herself, or else she was in too much pain to pull it out.’
‘You mean it was still inside her? What did she use?’
‘A uterine curette. I’m not entirely sure what that is. It perforated her uterus and was still embedded post-mortem. The pathologist is writing cause of death as haemorrhagic shock. So what is it?’
‘It’s a surgical instrument, shaped like a long crochet needle with a teardrop hook. It’s used to scrape contents from the uterus. Used during surgical abortion and always under anaesthetic. Can you imagine any woman doing that to herself? Inserting a needle through her own vagina? I’m sorry to be so graphic, but that’s exactly what this is.’