(1998) Denial (14 page)

‘They’re strong cars, Volvos. I was told they’re a good car to be in a crash in.’

Michael glanced fleetingly at the photograph of Katy. ‘I think it’s better not to be in a crash at all.’ His eyes met Goel’s, and suddenly, he felt himself flushing.

Did Goel know about the accident? Unlikely, although Michael
had
written some intensely personal pieces for several newspapers in the months following her death on bereavement. And it wasn’t uncommon for a patient to try to play mind games with him, but rarely at a first consultation.

And Dr Terence Goel, sitting on the sofa, maintained his body in a perfectly relaxed stance, knowing that Michael Tennent was watching every twitch, every blink, looking for clues, trying to find those little dotted lines marked
open here
that would lead him into his psyche.

In your dreams, Dr Tennent
.

Then, aloud, he said, ‘I hate cocktail parties.’

‘Why is that?’ Michael replied.

Dr Goel blanked him. ‘Why is what?’

‘Why do you hate cocktail parties?’

‘What makes you think I hate cocktail parties?’ Dr Goel asked, with disarming innocence.

‘You just said so.’

Dr Goel frowned at him. ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t say anything.’

On the top sheet of paper in the file folder, beneath where he had written today’s date, 23 July, with his Parker fountain pen (a first wedding anniversary gift from Katy) Michael made a note. Some conditions made people speak aloud without realising they had done so.

Thomas Lamark had to work hard to suppress a smile. This was going to be much easier than he had feared. You might be smart, Dr Michael Tennent, but you have no idea how much smarter I am.

Tina Mackay had been his only slip-up so far. Not a big slip-up, but unnecessary. He had not done his research properly with her, hadn’t known her father was so high profile, a big cheese in the civil service: the coverage they had given his daughter’s disappearance was out of all proportion to her significance.

Every bloody day there was an article. Quotes from friends, quotes from her mother, quotes from the police. Everyone was getting more worried. And the police had no leads!

There had been six editors on the list who had turned the book down. Any one of them would have done fine. The coin had told him to take Tina Mackay.

He blamed the coin.

This office was a tip, it was disgusting, really it was. How could the psychiatrist work here? How could he find anything? Look at the wodges of paper, the loose floppy disks, the magazines, the files, just piled everywhere, haphazardly. Anyone would think he was in the middle of moving in but he had been here for seven years.

You are far, far filthier than a pig, Dr Tennent, and one day, very soon, you are going to squeal far, far louder than one
.

And that’s before I start to really hurt you
.

Thomas had familiarised himself with the building before coming in. He’d strolled around the grounds, checked out the exits, the fire escapes, and then taken a good walk around the inside, carrying his clipboard. He reckoned it was a fair bet that if you carried a clipboard no one would challenge you.

Now he knew all the staircases, passages, doors.

He also knew he was Michael Tennent’s last patient today. It would be easy to take him or kill him after the session. But that would be too easy, and he wasn’t ready yet. He still had unfinished business.

‘I’d like to know a bit about your parents, Terence. Are they still alive?’

Instantly, Michael saw the reaction in the man’s face, as if he had touched a deep nerve.

Dr Goel did not reply.

Michael saw the man struggle to keep his composure. His body language had changed from a man at ease to someone under threat. Dr Goel leaned forward, arms tightly crossed, then he leaned back.

Michael gave him a couple of minutes, and when he still did not say anything, Michael asked, ‘Do you find it difficult to talk about your parents?’

‘I don’t find it difficult to talk about anything, Dr Tennent,’ he replied, with haunted eyes.

There was clearly a big key in his childhood, but Michael could not find the way into it today. All further questions about his parents simply made Goel clam up and rock backwards and forwards in his chair.

Michael moved to a different subject, planning to come back at the parents from another angle, and asked Dr Goel about his work.

‘I’m afraid it is classified information,’ he replied.

Michael looked down at the man’s incomplete form. ‘You are a widower. Shall we talk about your late wife?’

‘You are asking a lot of questions, Dr Tennent.’

‘Do you resent that?’

‘Why should I?’

Michael changed tack again. ‘How do you wish me to help? What is the problem you want me to solve?’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ Dr Goel said. ‘You are asking a lot of questions.’

At six o’clock, Michael shook Dr Terence Goel’s hand, and Terence Goel told him he looked forward to seeing him again the following week, at the same time.

Michael closed the door, sat down and glanced through his notes. He felt zonked – exhausted and confused by the man. It had been a long day. Dr Terence Goel, what do I make of you? What the hell is going on inside your head? If you want me to help you, you are going to have to open up to me. What have I learned about you today? Every time I asked you a question you replied with a question. You have one hell of a personality disorder. You are stubborn. You are a control freak. You are confused. Delusional. You very definitely have an obsessive streak.

Your parents are your Achilles’ heel.

The lawnmower was still going strong outside. Jesus, how much grass was out there?

He returned to the referral letter from Goel’s doctor.
Clinical depression
. He wasn’t convinced depression was at the heart of all this.

To the bottom of the list of notes he had written down, he added a mental one: ‘FUBAB’. It stood for Fucked Up Beyond All Belief.

Then he turned to his computer and, once more, for the hundredth time today, checked his e-mail. With a beat of excitement he saw, finally, that he had a reply from Amanda Capstick. He dragged the mouse across the pad, and double clicked on the e-mail to open it. Like the one he had sent her, it was short and simple. It said: ‘I’m missing you too.’

Detective Constable Glenn Branson eyed the brand new Jaguar sports convertible that was driving in the opposite direction to him, along the seafront towards Brighton, with its roof down, its wipers jerking across the dry windscreen and its hazard lights flashing.

In particular he looked at the driver, a greaseball youth who shot him a nervous glance. Although Glenn was in plain clothes in an unmarked car, if the youth was a local villain he would be aware of the tell-tale signs: the make of car, dark colour, type of radio aerial. Glenn noted he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

In the short time he had been with the force, Glenn had earned respect and he was well liked; although a rookie detective, he was a mature human being, having joined the force relatively late, at twenty-nine. He had completed two years’ as a police constable, first on foot patrol then in cars, and had then successfully applied for the CID. He’d served the standard two years probation period then, just two months ago, had completed a further year as a temporary detective constable, following which he had taken and passed the CID course with honours.

In his former life, Glenn had worked for ten years as a nightclub bouncer. He was black, six foot three inches tall, weighed a tad under two hundred pounds and was as bald as a meteorite. Not many people had given him trouble, and the job had paid so well he’d been scared to give it up. It wasn’t until his son, Sammy, was born that he had plucked up the courage to change. He wanted his son to be proud of him. He didn’t ever want his son to have to tell someone that his daddy was a bouncer.

Normally Glenn brimmed with confidence but in these few weeks since passing his exams and becoming a fully fledged detective he had been nervous. There was a huge amount to remember and he wanted to get it right. He’d seen how easily the police could lose a case by a simple error in procedure. In the movie
Storm-10
, Kirk Douglas, quoting Einstein, had said, ‘Heaven is in the details.’ Good policing was in the
details
, too.

Glenn was ambitious and he had some catching up to do in his new career. He had calculated he could make inspector or even chief inspector by his mid-forties. And that would be something he wanted to hear Sammy telling people. ‘My dad’s a chief inspector!’

I will be, Sammy, I promise you
.

This Jaguar was definitely wrong.

So far he’d had a good day. He’d been congratulated on a piece of detection work by the DCI at the station. A suspected antique-jewellery thief had denied being in Brighton on the day of the raid on a shop in the town and had a strong alibi – a sworn statement from a witness that he had been in London the whole of that day. Glenn had discovered a mobile phone registered in one of the suspect’s alias names. From analysis of the bill provided by Vodaphone, he could see that two calls had been made on the phone at different cells along the London-Brighton line, travelling north, two hours after the raid.

A stolen car would add another small feather to his cap. He had one job to do this afternoon, which was to take a statement at a flat that had been burgled last night. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then, he hoped, he could get off shift promptly at four in time to catch the four forty-five showing at the Duke of York cinema of a 1950s movie he had never seen on a big screen,
On the Waterfront
. Outside police work and his family, Glenn ate, drank and breathed old movies.

He swung round the car in a U-turn, accelerated hard, overtook two vehicles and pulled in directly behind the Jag. The driver seemed to be struggling with the controls. Glenn
pressed the transmit button on the car’s radio, and said, ‘This is Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four.’

He heard a female voice at Central Control acknowledge him. ‘Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four.’

The Jag driver continued, unaware of him, still apparently struggling, wipers arcing away.

‘I am following a Jaguar sports car which I view with suspicion, navy blue, registration Romeo five-two-one Yankee November Victor, westbound on Hove Kingsway. Have a uniform patrol check it.’

‘Jaguar sports, navy blue, registration Romeo five-two-one Yankee November Victor. Thank you, Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four.’

Then he heard his local control on the personal radio clipped to his belt, a cheery male voice, Ray Dunkley – Glenn had met him a couple of times. He was putting out a call to a uniform police constable.

‘Charlie Hotel One-Six-Two, we have a grade three for you, a resident at three Adelaide Crescent is reporting concern about an elderly neighbour who hasn’t been sighted for three days. The name of the person she’s concerned about is Cora Burstridge.’

Glenn’s ears pricked up. He fumbled for his radio, unclipped it and raised it to his mouth. ‘Sorry to butt in, Control, this is Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four. Is that Cora Burstridge the actress?
The
Cora Burstridge?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘I knew she lived somewhere around there! I’m on my way to take a statement at fifteen Adelaide Crescent, I can check it out.’

‘Do you want to be bothered? Uniform can get over there some time this afternoon.’

‘It’s no bother!’

‘Thanks, Charlie Hotel One-Four-Four, if you don’t mind? Be helpful – we’re a car short today.’

Glenn felt a surge of excitement. ‘Cora Burstridge! Wow! She’s something else. Did you see her in
Rivers of Chance
with Robert Donat and Cary Grant? Nineteen fifty-two?’

‘Before my time. Afraid I’m not as old as you, Glenn.’

‘Ya, very witty.’

‘The neighbour will let you in. Mrs Winston. Flat seven.’

As he released his mike switch, the car’s radio fizzed again, and he heard the female controller putting out the details of the Jaguar. Moments later, he made a left turn into Adelaide Crescent, and watched the Jaguar continue on towards the congested traffic of central Brighton. Either the kiddie was innocent, or was planning to leg it on foot into the crowds rather than try to out-drive the police.

Glenn parked his car almost directly outside number 3, Adelaide Crescent, a proud classical Regency terrace: columned porticoes, tall sash windows, white paintwork fading and flaking under the relentless corrosion of the salty air. Its air of faded grandeur made it just the right kind of building for a star like Cora Burstridge, Glenn thought. It had real
style
.

He felt a guilty thrill of excitement just staring up at it, thinking about the actress who lived there. It ought not to matter to him who it was, his actions should be just the same for everyone, but of course this mattered to him.

Cora Burstridge!

He could reel off the names of every single one of her forty-seven movies by heart.
Safe Arrival. Monaco Suite. Forgetting Mr Didcote. Desert Tune
. Comedies. Musicals. Thrillers. Romances. She was so versatile, so beautiful, so graceful, and so very sharp-witted. Glenn had seen her only recently in a television adaptation of a Robert Goddard novel, and she still looked marvellous and gave a powerful performance. And, of course, only on Monday night she’d been on television at the BAFTA awards, where she had delivered a slightly disappointing acceptance speech, he thought. But he could forgive her that: the poor woman had clearly been overwhelmed by the adulation.

Must be about sixty-five now, he calculated. Amazing how good she looked. He glanced up at the windows of the building and felt a lump in his throat. He hoped fervently that she was all right.

He rang the bell for flat seven. Mrs Winston met him on
the third floor. She was a pleasant woman well into her seventies, her grey hair elegantly coiffed.

Two bouquets were propped against the wall outside Cora Burstridge’s door. The hall was musty and smelt of cats, and it was dark and much less impressive than the exterior of the building: everything was browned with age and it felt as sad as a railway-station waiting room.