The Watcher (49 page)

She can’t let me get away
, thought Gillian.
She can just try to make me disappear in a way that doesn’t implicate her. That’s what she’s up to.

With this thought, her breathing immediately became more laboured. The blanket seemed to press on her face like a lead weight, the masking tape suffocated her not only directly by covering her mouth, but by the nauseous smell of its surface. The car started, stopped, started again. Urban roads. Early Friday evening. They would proceed at this stop-start rhythm at least until the edge of town. There might be traffic jams on the motorway too. The heavy traffic also made her feel sick. The heat, the smell, the car juddering forward: all these things churned up Gillian’s stomach. She felt lucky that she had barely eaten anything all day. Nevertheless, the sick feeling was just going to get worse.

Don’t think about it, she told herself, calling up all her strength of will. Focus on something else.

She could hear the muffled voice of a radio presenter. It was the weather report. It was going to be very cold in the coming days. No more snow was expected, but he recommended that drivers stay at home if they could. The Highways Agency was still struggling to free the roads from the last cold snap.

Then music came on.

Gillian thought she could even hear Tara humming along with the melody.

You always get a second chance, she thought; make sure you’re ready to use yours.

She had to immediately brush away her next thought:
Silly saying, that thing about a second chance. There’s no guarantee you will.

Sometimes you don’t even have one chance.

He had expected that no one would be home at Tara Caine’s flat. Nevertheless, he had rung the bell a few times, and then stepped back to the street and peered up at the balcony. Just darkness behind the living room windows. The smaller windows beside the balcony must be part of her flat too, and they weren’t lit up either.

This was the moment to involve the police.

John got back into his car.

He thought of the evening he’d driven Gillian back here. At the start of January. She had fetched a few things from her house and been confronted for the first time with the place where her husband had been violently killed. He had helped her to carry her belongings upstairs, but she didn’t want him to come inside. He had understood that Becky was there, disturbed and confused by the murder. And keen of hearing. That she was not to see another man at her mother’s side so soon after her father’s death, even if only as a helpful friend. That she would have sensed that there was more to it. At least Gillian had expressed that worry, and John had respected her concern.

Now, looking up at the dark flat again, he thought that maybe she’d not just been thinking about Becky. Maybe she’d already had a funny feeling about Tara. Maybe Tara had already started to plot against him.

No, surely not. It was only that night, he remembered, that Gillian had told Tara about the events that had led to his leaving the force. Afterwards, the two women had argued. Tara had expressed her complete incomprehension at Gillian’s involvement with a man whose earlier life was stained with the word
rape
; a stain that, in spite of all efforts to remove it, had never disappeared completely. She must have argued very forcefully, because right after that, Gillian had sent Becky to her grandparents in Norwich and had returned to her own house – contrary to the advice of someone who meant her well.

Why could he not shake the feeling that he was missing something at just this point?

I told Tara that you’d been a policeman. And why you aren’t any more . . .

He could hear Gillian’s voice in his head. He had wondered why she was going back to her house and she had tried to explain it to him. She had felt uneasy because it had to do with his past and because she had to confront him with the fact that the incident was still sticking to him, causing mistrust and prejudice, and that it probably always would.

She was gobsmacked . . .

Something was not right with that.

She was gobsmacked . . .

What had Kate told him? Tara Caine had requested his file and read it – back in December. She had given it back, according to Kate, before Christmas. That meant that on that Thursday evening at the start of January when Gillian had told her about the investigations into his past, she had already known about them. In great detail, because she’d had access to the whole file. If she was gobsmacked, then she was just pretending. She must have acted out her horror for Gillian.

Why?

Maybe she wanted to hide the fact that she had been snooping. John supposed that the mention of his name might have rung distant bells for her, because of a conversation with a colleague or something overheard in a corridor. She had done her research . . . and kept it to herself. At that point she must have assumed that Gillian had no idea of his past. As a best friend, would it not have been normal for her to tell her what she had discovered immediately? She was obviously not convinced of John’s innocence. She certainly still saw him as a danger. Why did she say nothing at first and then act all surprised?

John knew that none of that was enough to construct anything that really implicated Tara. A whole series of harmless explanations for her behaviour were imaginable. The fact that she was helping Liza Stanford did not automatically make her a suspect either. However, the number of strange events did alarm him.

And he was worried by the fact that the two women had suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Making his mind up, he turned on the engine and did a risky U-turn, as cars around him beeped.

Then he drove towards Scotland Yard.

Constable Rick Meyers had expected a quiet Saturday morning shift at the station. He thought he would have time to finally catch up with some of the paperwork that had been piling up on his desk. The snowy world outside was quiet and peaceful and shone innocent white. Perhaps it was the weather that suggested that nothing would happen that day. In any case, he was royally annoyed when his boss turned up and shoved a piece of paper in his face.

‘We’ve got something to check. From Scotland Yard in London. It’s about a Mrs Lucy Caine-Roslin. She lives in Reddish Lane.’

‘Reddish Lane. In Gorton?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid you’ll have to drive out there.’

‘What’s it about?’ Meyers asked. He had just got stuck into his reports.

‘Her daughter might be there. That’s what we need to find out. She’s got some big questions to answer.’

‘The daughter?’ Meyers was not there yet.

‘Yes. She’s gone missing, but they have to question her urgently and it’s possible that she’s driven to her mother’s house. The daughter is called . . .’ his boss paused, looking at his notes, ‘Tara Caine. She’s a public prosecutor in London.’

‘And why don’t we just call this Lucy Caine-Roslin first of all?’ asked Meyers, as he slowly stood up. He could guess that his boss had already considered this option, and that there was some reason why they could not. So his idea was not going to save him a trip to one of the less pleasant parts of Manchester.

‘They’ve already tried repeatedly. No one answers the phone. Nothing for it. You have to drop by. We can’t ignore Scotland Yard.’

At least there was not much traffic, it being early on Saturday morning, and the roads had been cleared. Rick Meyers made good progress. Nevertheless, he could have done without this chore, and not just because it delayed his other work. No policeman liked to drive to Gorton, in the south of Manchester, even if it were only to find some old biddy. Any apparently harmless job in that area might end in disaster. Gorton had nicer and less nice spots. The less nice places had many condemned houses where junkies lived. The junkies did not dither around if they saw a chance to get some cash for their next hit. Whoever moved here was at the bottom end of the social ladder and could not go down any further. Violence was rife and the police were seen as unwelcome intruders. And Meyers was not a hero. He often wondered why he was stupid enough to earn his living working for the police of all people.

This morning he asked himself the same question, and, as always, had no answer to give.

The appearance of the streets changed slowly. You did not suddenly arrive in Gorton. The area announced itself gradually. The houses became shabbier. The green areas grew more infrequent until they disappeared completely. Then came an industrial area that looked abandoned and wretched even under a thick layer of snow. Then a discount clothes store that, this morning at least, no one seemed to have found their way to. A scrapyard. Right next to that a row of terraced houses gradually crumbling away. Only the rubbish – some of it in bin bags, some of it just thrown out of windows – revealed that the houses were inhabited. Then there were tenement houses. Walls scrawled with graffiti. Broken window panes. One house’s front door had been torn off. More and more rubbish, dirt and neglect. Meyers knew that there would be many needles in the rubbish. Annoyed, he looked at a small child playing on the road in spite of the cold and dirt – the child was not being supervised and was in real danger. Its parents were probably sleeping or drunk or stoned or all at once. The child was beaming. Even in this terrible environment, he was obviously happy that it had snowed. Like any other child.

Meyers felt sad.

It was a mystery to him how a girl from here had made it as a lawyer in London. A tough cookie, no doubt.

Reddish Lane was long. Meyers was relieved to see that the house he had to visit was not on one of the worst stretches. On the ground floor of many of the houses there were shops and businesses of varying sizes. Although some of them had obviously given up and were either boarded up or had their shutters down permanently, most of them kept on bravely. The area seemed to be anything but well-off, but it was not utterly neglected.

It could have been much worse, he thought.

Mrs Caine-Roslin lived in a small detached redbrick house. It had a tiny garden around it. At the back, a somewhat dilapidated shed was visible. The house itself seemed solid enough. Only when you looked closely did you see signs that nothing had been done to maintain it for a long time. The window frames needed to be painted, the garden gate repaired and some of the roof tiles replaced. Like so many houses in the street, the ground floor was a shop front, now closed with blue shutters. A sign said that it was a bicycle repair shop. The sign was old and the lettering was hard to decipher, worn as it was from the years of wind, rain and sun. It did not look like there was a workshop here any more.

It was questionable as to whether anyone still lived in the house.

Rick Meyers parked at the side of the road, got out and looked doubtfully up at the first-floor windows. He could not see a light on, but then it was also no longer dark. There were at least curtains in the windows and he thought he could even see one or two potted plants. Yet a strange lifelessness hung over the house and the garden, although perhaps that came from the obviously abandoned business on the ground floor.

Meyers trudged through the snow that no one on the property had cleared away. Perhaps Mrs Caine-Roslin had moved away. Perhaps her daughter had taken her to London long ago and found an old people’s home for her. Strange that she was still down on the electoral roll here. But sometimes these things happened.

And the daughter had disappeared and was being hunted by Scotland Yard.

Odd, no two ways about it.

There was a door that led to the lower rooms, but entry had been blocked by two crossed boards that had been nailed over the door and frame. Beside the door, a steep flight of steps led up the outside wall. There was another door at the top. It did not look like this one was blocked.

There was such thick snow on the steps that Rick Meyers had trouble climbing them. On one side was the wall, but there was no hand railing on the other side, nothing to hold on to. No one had cleared the snow from the steps for weeks. Rick Meyers wondered how an old woman had managed to navigate them. Surely Lucy Caine-Roslin had to go out sometimes and get food? The fresh snowfall made it impossible to see when someone had last tried to climb up or down. But if he, as a relatively young man, was having difficulties, how would an elderly woman cope? He felt it was increasingly likely that no one lived here.

Finally reaching the top, he knocked on the wooden door. It was black, and the paint was starting to peel at the edges.

‘Mrs Caine-Roslin? Can you please open the door?’ He listened carefully. ‘It’s Constable Meyers here.’

No movement from inside. He knocked again, more forcefully this time. ‘Please, Mrs Caine-Roslin. Police! I’d like to ask a quick question.’

There was not a single sound.

Meyers tried the doorknob. To his surprise, it turned. The door opened inwards. It had not been locked.

He gagged as the disgusting smell of decay hit him from the hermetically sealed flat.

‘Bloody hell!’ He felt around for a tissue but could not find one. He looked for a window that he could throw open. The kitchen window was the closest option. Meyers pushed past table and chairs, turned the handle and leant far out. Cold, fresh winter air in his face. It was only a minute since he had trudged through the snow down there, and already it felt to him as if he had not breathed that wonderful air for an eternity. As if he was a part of the stench that permeated the flat.

His fingers, which were still searching through the pockets of his uniform, finally found a balled-up tissue and fished it out. Meyers hated what he would have to do next. But he was a policeman. He had to get to the bottom of whatever horror awaited him in the flat.

He took a deep breath and, pressing the tissue over his mouth and nose, turned away from the window. He glanced around the kitchen. It looked clean and tidy, although there was a thin layer of dust on all the furniture. There were two plates on the table on which the unidentifiable remains of a meal were rotting away. They were covered with a bluish-white growth that no doubt added to the smell in the flat, although it surely wasn’t solely responsible for it. Two half-full glasses of wine and a bottle stood next to the plates. It was an expensive wine, as Meyers could tell from the label. Whatever had happened to Lucy Caine-Roslin – and it was clearly nothing good – it had interrupted a meal. A meal where she was obviously not alone.