Dying for Christmas (20 page)

I’d seen there were only three presents remaining and I knew I was getting closer to finding out what had happened to her. But I also knew there was a big part of me that didn’t want to know, particularly not when finding out about her brought me closer to finding out what would happen to me.

Sometimes I allowed myself to fantasize that he would let me go once the whole charade of the presents was over. I’d picture myself stumbling out on to an unfamiliar east London road, blinking in the winter sun. But mostly I tried not to think ahead.

By this time it was almost second nature to me to avoid moving the leg with the shackle on. Instead, I lay still and held up my hands in front of my face, checking what new damage the night had wrought on my nails and skin. I saw immediately that the rash had now spread to the backs of my hands, but it was almost as if I was observing this development on someone else. I reached the fingers of my left hand up to my head and felt experimentally along my hairline. Loosened hairs cascaded down my forehead into my eyes and I brushed them absently away.

The tingling in my nerve endings was like a million mini electric shocks, and I was so very, very tired.

‘Rise and shine,’ carolled Dominic by the archway to the kennel. There seemed to be a curious correlation between his mood and my health – the weaker I became, the more cheerful he was.

Go figure
, said Travis’ voice in my head.

Breakfast was toast and coffee – almost civilized, apart from the four sugars Dominic insisted on heaping into my drink. I saw that the freezer was stuffed with bread and milk that Dominic defrosted overnight as and when we were running low so there was no need to go to the shops. He’d really thought of everything. I felt a sudden irrational pang of gratitude towards him for how he was looking after me.

‘As it’s our tenth day together – our anniversary, you could say – I’m giving you a treat.’

Even in the state I was in, I brightened up. A treat. I’d been reduced to the level of a child.

‘We’re going to go in there today. I know you’ve been desperate to, ever since you arrived.’

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I smiled so that he would know I was pleased to be going wherever it was he thought I’d wanted to go.

‘We might even have present time there. Just to spice things up a bit. We wouldn’t want everything to get too samey, would we, sweetheart?’

No, I agreed. We wouldn’t.

It was only afterwards, when I was lying back on the sofa cushions, listening to some classical music that Dominic had kindly put on, that I grasped what he meant.

We were going into the locked room.

* * *

Kim couldn’t seem to get a handle on Travis Riley.

When they’d first met, she’d found him slightly overearnest but attractive in a geeky kind of way. But the more she got to know him, the more that seemed to be a front. A couple of times when she’d been talking to the Gold family about Jessica, she’d glanced over and caught an expression of annoyance on his face, in place of his habitual eternal-student gawkiness. Of course most people play a part to an extent, Kim knew that, but this was more than adopting a persona or conforming to type. She couldn’t help feeling he was hiding something – not necessarily about Jessica’s disappearance, but something about their relationship that might throw a different light on the case.

In her own time she’d started researching into Travis’ background, trawling through social media sites. He had a Facebook page, but didn’t seem to be very active on it. She guessed he didn’t have a lot of spare time.

This morning’s visit to Travis’ boss wasn’t exactly secret, it was just that she hadn’t got around to mentioning it to Martin yet.

She knew Travis was still off work – on compassionate leave was what she believed – so there was little chance of him spotting her as she entered the brown-brick teaching hospital in east London; still, she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was betraying him by checking up on him. Of course, Travis’ movements over the day of Jessica’s disappearance had already been thoroughly verified and there seemed little chance that between leaving work mid-afternoon and meeting friends for drinks that evening, he’d managed to make his girlfriend disappear so thoroughly that no trace of her had been found. However, Kim still wasn’t completely satisfied. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but something wasn’t falling into place.

After wandering around numerous different blocks and wings, she eventually located the medical school in a building at the back of the hospital site, possibly the furthest point away from the way she’d come in. Travis’ supervisor in the paediatrics department was a small, wiry man with those disconcerting frameless glasses that disappear and reappear on a person’s face according to the angle you’re looking at them. He introduced himself formally as Mr Stevens. Though Kim knew hospital consultants were always misters not doctors, she couldn’t stop herself addressing him as ‘doctor’. After the third time he stopped correcting her.

‘Shall we sit over here?’ They’d met in a corridor that smelt like swimming baths and he now led her to a seating area, where they perched side by side on orange plastic chairs as if they’d come to watch a show.

‘We’re just gathering information at the moment,’ she told him. ‘It’s purely routine.’

‘I understand,’ he said. Though he was making an effort to be cool, Kim could see by the flush in his cheeks that he was quite enjoying being so close to a crime investigation.

‘I’m just looking for a bit of background on Travis Riley—’

Mr Stevens interrupted her quickly. ‘I have to tell you, Detective, I haven’t known Travis long. He’s only been specializing in paediatrics since August. Before that, he was on our foundation training programme, working in different departments around the hospital.’

‘OK, but maybe you’d be able to tell me if he’s been acting out of character at all recently. Has he taken time off without explanation? Gone home early? Arrived late? Got into arguments with his peers?’

Mr Stevens shook his head with an expression of regret. Kim got the impression he was desperately trying to scrape up some piece of information that would help, to be the hero of the hour. In her last posting they used to call it the
Crimewatch
syndrome – where people are so keen to be part of the investigation they sometimes invent details, or wrongfully identify suspects.

‘Before you arrived I checked the notes from his previous supervisors in his file. Apparently there was a period, just over a year ago, where his timekeeping went a bit haywire and he skipped a few sessions without a proper explanation. I think there might have been some concern about his commitment, but that seems to have been a short-lived blip.’

‘And that was, what, fourteen or fifteen months ago?’

‘Thereabouts.’

So it didn’t have anything to do with Jessica’s odd behaviour at work which had happened around five or six months ago.

For all her extra work, Kim was right back where she started.

* * *

Time was doing weird things. Now that I existed in this fevered state I could no longer tell whether a minute had passed or an hour. I couldn’t remember a past before I’d been in this apartment and the thought of getting out of it was oddly terrifying. Yet the day after tomorrow the last present would be opened, and then he’d either have to kill me or let me go.

I lay on the sofa and gazed at the ceiling high above and imagined how it would have looked when this place was still a working warehouse. I thought of how many men would have laboured in this very room, day in, day out, heaving crates and packing boxes, hoping, dreaming, living, dying.

Dominic no longer shackled me to the radiator when he disappeared off to the bathroom. I had no energy to get up, let alone make an escape. Whenever I attempted to stand everything ached, and my nerves burned when I moved. Better to lie still and do nothing. He came and sat behind me, gently lifting my head on to his lap and stroking it like it was a cat.

His touch still made my skin crawl and yet it
was
touch. A reminder that I was human. I could have lain there almost happily for ever, it seemed to me, but then I felt Dominic sigh.

‘It’s time,’ he said.

I didn’t ask him what it was time for. It no longer mattered.

He helped me to my feet and we set off shuffling across the wooden floor. The flat seemed to have taken on stadium-size proportions and progress was agonizing and slow.

At first Dominic was solicitous, matching his steps to mine and asking if I was all right, but after a while he became impatient.

‘You’re not even trying,’ he snapped. ‘Why must you make such a big deal out of everything? You’ve only got a common cold. Do you know your trouble, Jessica?’

I shook my head, the slightest of movements.

‘You’re spoilt. All the women I’ve ever known have been spoilt. Except Mummy, of course.’

‘But you hated your mother.’

Wham! The explosion came from nowhere, knocking me across the floor.

I put my hand up to my head and it came away wet with blood, mixed with hair.

‘You have to do it, don’t you, Jessica? You have to go making your silly ignorant assumptions based on nothing but your own non-existent experience of life. I loved my mother. What, you think you non-dysfunctional types have a monopoly on love? It’s time you grew up, Jessica Gold.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

I couldn’t stand that I’d upset him. Not when he was being so nice to me.

‘Don’t cry, Jessica,’ he said. ‘You’re so ugly when you cry.’

The blow to my head had shaken off my torpor and now I felt everything keenly – the pains in my abdomen, the disturbing tingling in my nerve endings, as if someone was plucking them like the strings of a harp.

I stopped still in the middle of the hallway, eyeing the locked door. Dread lodged in my throat, making it hard to breathe.

‘I don’t want to go in there.’

‘Nonsense, Jessica. I know you’ve been itching to get in there, ever since you arrived.’

I tried to deny it, but he was already reaching into his pocket for his huge bunch of keys.

‘The green one, I think, today,’ he said. ‘Do come closer, sweetheart. I wouldn’t want to leave you behind.’

He put the green-fobbed key in the lock and turned it. The clicking noise was like a gunshot.

‘Come on,’ he said, turning the handle. He reached out and grabbed my arm as he nudged open the door and he yanked me in front of him and shoved me through.

* * *

Kim was leaning against the wall at the side of the station building and wishing she smoked.

All around her, she could see other police officers drawing on cigarettes with that semi-orgasmic expression endemic to smokers. If she could just have a cigarette to distract her, she thought, she might be able to get through this phone call with her mother without falling apart.

‘I just don’t understand,’ her mum was saying, for the millionth time. ‘How can any job be worth your family?’

‘It’s not. That’s not the way it is. I just think there must be a way I can have both – a job
and
my kids.’

‘Yes, but just not that particular job. At least not at this particular time.’

‘But I’m good at my job, Mum. Play to your strengths, that’s what you always told us to do.’

‘Well, I’m afraid in this case you just have to compromise. Or go part-time until the kids are older. The police force is always bleating on about offering flexible hours for women. Sean even emailed me a link to a newspaper feature about it.’

So it had come to that. Her husband sending internet links to her mother to win her support.

‘We can’t afford for me to be part-time. Have you looked at the cost of living in London lately? And anyway, how it looks on paper isn’t how it works in reality. Have you seen how few senior policewomen there are? And by the time the kids are independent I’ll be too old. Mum, I’m sick of apologizing for wanting to do well.’

‘Kim, love, I want you to do well too. I know your job’s important to you, but some things are more important. Your marriage. Your children.’

Kim was finding it hard to talk around the bitter lump that had suddenly formed in the back of her mouth.

‘So Sean gets to keep his job and his house and his kids because he’s a man, but I have to choose.’

‘Oh, don’t be so simplistic!’

Kim had rarely heard her mum so angry.

‘This isn’t about men and women, it’s about the fact that Sean’s job allows him to be home every night and to arrange reliable childcare with regular hours, not be calling around everyone you know to find emergency playdates because you’re not going to be back when you said. Those children need you. You’re their mother.’

‘And I’m just to forget my own dreams.’

‘Yes. Frankly, yes.’

* * *

The room was pretty much a mirror image in size and shape to the bedroom next door, with the same high, small window giving out on to the brick sidewall of the next building. There was another double bed with crisp white bedding facing the door, while the wall to the left was completely covered by a storage system made up of deep white cube-like shelves on which various things were neatly stacked – books, photograph albums, CDs. I saw the art equipment he’d used a few days before – the paints and brushes. And the beautiful chess set. The opposite wall was raw brick and almost obscured by another huge painting, like the one in the living room. I could recognize Dominic’s trade marks – the curiously lumpy texture of the paint, the unsubtle colour palette, the model. Natalie again, this time sprawling completely naked on a bed, with only a crumpled sheet preserving what scraps of modesty remained.