Close Your Eyes (12 page)

‘Your wife needs help,’ I say. ‘She should see a grief counsellor.’

‘My wife is fine,’ he answers, clenching his teeth and flexing the cartilage behind his jawline.

‘Can’t you see she’s struggling?’

‘Leave my family alone.’

The DCS is walking towards us. Francis stabs a finger in her direction. ‘This is your fault!’ he yells. ‘Do your job.’

It’s amazing how easily I slip back into the rhythms and routines of the cottage, practices that are embossed upon my memory like Braille – rinsing plates, packing the dishwasher, wiping benches and discussing the day’s events. Julianne is making small talk and acting as though nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, my mind is conjuring up every worst-case scenario.

I keep trying to get her alone, but she finds excuses to slip away. Even now, when Emma is watching TV in the sitting room and Charlie is upstairs, she avoids the subject.

‘You can’t keep fobbing me off,’ I say.

‘I’m not fobbing you off.’

‘We have to talk.’

She surveys the kitchen. ‘When are you going back to London?’

‘First thing in the morning.’

‘But you’re coming back, right?’

‘I’ll pack a suitcase and make sure my neighbour waters the plants.’

‘You have plants?’

‘I have two.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t do that.’

‘What?’

‘You’re changing the subject. I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.’

‘OK, let’s talk. Take me to the pub.’

She wants to be somewhere public. Not a good sign.

It’s still light outside. I hear shouts of young children playing in a paddling pool and the sound of canned laughter from open windows. At the Fox and Badger the heavy door eases shut behind us. The publican, Hector, nods and asks if I’ve been on holiday. Hector still thinks I live in the village even after two years away. I’m one of the founding members of the Divorced Men’s Club in Wellow, which includes Hector. Our numbers are dwindling. Two of the lads have remarried and a third has come out and is living with his former best man. Who says romance is dead?

I order Julianne a glass of wine. We take a table in the quietest corner, away from the kitchen and the busy end of the bar. I recognise most of the regulars – lumpy-faced locals who nod and say ‘aye’ even when disagreeing; and ‘no, no, no, aye’ when agreeing.

Julianne centres her wine on her coaster. Not satisfied, she picks up the glass and places it down again.

‘I have ovarian cancer,’ she says, not looking at my face. ‘They did an ultrasound a week ago. The mass is about seven centimetres. They want to do a CT scan next Wednesday and then I’ll have surgery.’

I struggle to swallow and feel the sweat prickle beneath my hairline. ‘What exactly did they say?’

‘My doctor is hopeful it might only be stage one. He said that ninety per cent of patients are still alive after five years. That seems pretty positive. The CT scan should tell us more. I’m refusing to worry until I know exactly what I’m dealing with.’

The silence is filled with a kind of temporal static and I have the sharpest, almost visceral sense that Julianne is going to die. My lips unglue. ‘How long have you known?’

‘A week.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘What are the options?’

‘A hysterectomy is pretty standard, then chemotherapy.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as possible.’

The gold flecks in her eyes seem to swim, or maybe they’re floating in mine. I almost put my arms around her. I almost touch her hair. The moment is lost. Questions spill out of me. When is she seeing the doctor again? Is her oncologist any good? Has she researched the surgeon? Who has she told? We can go private. No waiting.

‘We need to get a second opinion.’

‘This
is
the second opinion.’

‘When are these other tests?’

‘Wednesday at four.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I’m coming. Have you told your mother?’

‘I didn’t want to bother anyone until I was sure. It’s not as though it’s anyone’s business except mine.’

‘Do the girls know?’

‘I talked to Charlie a few days ago. I told her about the ultrasound. Emma must have been listening.’ Her voice almost breaks. She picks up her wine. Two hands. Unsteady. Sips.

Up until this moment, Julianne and I have had a nice, cosy system worked out – living separate lives in separate houses, sharing our daughters. We have had flings, woes, laughs and a Heinz-like variety of irritations, but fundamentally we’re still the same two people in slightly different orbits. Now she is trying to dismiss this as nothing – a mere trifle, another hiccup – but this
is
something. This is life-changing. This is epochal.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s I couldn’t go home and tell Julianne. Instead I slept with a woman who wasn’t my wife. It was a one-night stand that will
always
stand – the low point of our marriage, the low point of my life. My diagnosis had devastated me. I was dumbfounded. Distraught. How could I tell Julianne and pull the pin on our perfect life and golden future? I should have had more faith in her. Instead I went to see Elisa – an old friend and a former patient – a woman who had spent years listening to unhappy men, not as a therapist but as a prostitute.

We think we know ourselves. We imagine our reaction to such a diagnosis. We’ve seen enough movies about cancer sufferers or read anything by Nicholas Sparks. We’re supposed to pound the walls, howl at the moon, buy a Porsche, take a world cruise, write to everyone we’ve ever wronged and then sit in the dark, watching old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies, drinking ourselves into oblivion.

The weird thing is I slept fine after my diagnosis. No nightmares. It was only during the day that I remembered. How could I forget? Now someone I love is going to experience this. I hear myself talking to Julianne, sounding like a veteran campaigner, but I’ve never had cancer or had to endure surgery.

She grows pensive again. ‘You don’t have to stay – I feel as though I’ve tricked you into coming.’

‘You didn’t trick me.’

‘It’s just until I get out of hospital.’

‘I’m here until you ask me to leave.’

Acorns snap and pop under our feet as we walk down Mill Hill Lane to the cottage. Julianne hooks her arm into mine and we match strides.

‘I know what you’re going to do,’ she says. ‘You’ll spend all night on the Internet, trying to Google up a cure.’

‘Might do.’

‘This feels a little strange.’

‘In a good way?’

‘Like uncharted territory.’

‘That can be good.’

‘I’m glad that we’re friends.’

‘Me too.’

That night, lying alone in Emma’s bed, I hold out my hand, reaching into the darkness, and I trace Julianne’s curves in my mind, feeling her breath against my face, her heart against mine. I know her body better than my own: her knees, her elbows, her belly button and the spot behind her ear that produces a sigh when kissed. I imagine it’s my secret place that nobody else knows about, but I wonder who else has discovered it or gone looking. It doesn’t matter any more. I’m here.

Just before dawn, when mist hangs in the valleys like spilled milk and the air is cool and clear, four police cars arrive at a farm in the Gordano Valley, less than six hundred yards from the murder house. Tommy Garrett and his grandmother are already awake, working beneath the dangling yellow light bulbs in the milking shed. Tommy is quickly handcuffed and led to a waiting car. Doreen slaps her grandson on the back of the head and yells, ‘What did you do?’

‘N-n-nothing.’

‘Must have been something.’

While the police search the house, Tommy is taken to Clevedon Police Station on Tickenham Road. Doreen stays at the farm, complaining about the search and demanding to know who is going to clean up the mess.

I’m in London by this time. The outskirts of the capital are interminable, but once I see the dense green of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens I feel a little more well disposed towards the city, with its stone arches, soaring domes and storybook qualities with place names that belonged to Dickens and Woolf and Keats.

Stopping at my flat, I drag a suitcase from beneath the bed and hurriedly pack some things. When I was young my mother insisted on picking out my clothes and hanging them on the doorknob while I slept. She dressed me like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a waistcoat and tie, while my sisters looked like Hayley Mills in
Pollyanna
. Ever since then I’ve struggled to make choices about what I should wear, which is why my wardrobe is full of chinos and long-sleeved cotton shirts and blue blazers. I have become a creature of habit in middle-aged camouflage.

After emptying the fridge of perishables, I leave a note for Henry, downstairs, asking him to water my indoor plants and keep an eye on the place. Stowing the suitcase in the car, I drive south to Fulham, parking outside a pastel-coloured terrace house in Rainville Road less than eighty yards from the Thames. Nobody answers the doorbell. I call Ruiz on his mobile and leave a message.

The pub over the road isn’t his regular boozer. The Crabtree is far too bright and welcoming. Ruiz prefers to drink in places where punters shield their eyes when the door opens and guard their drinks as though the Chancellor of the Exchequer has rationed them. I don’t understand the attraction, but Ruiz says the cleanliness of the pipes and quality of the ales are more important than buxom barmaids and sparkling conversation. Vincent is a man of simple tastes and complex humanity, who has never tried to shake his past, because he knows that it cannot be altered. Instead he reminds me of a punch-drunk boxer who hears a bell and charges out of his corner, head down and arms swinging. The footwork has slowed, but he can still deliver a punch that will stop a tram.

I see him now, standing at the entrance to the beer garden, searching for me. I wave. He nods. Gesticulates. Do I want a drink? I shake my head. He gets himself a Guinness.

‘A little early,’ I say, as he centres the foaming pint glass on a coaster.

‘It’s a pub not a coffee shop.’

He takes a small sip and then a bigger one. Satisfied, he drains half the glass. Dressed in loose-fitting jeans, a T-shirt and a scuffed leather jacket, he has the physique of a rugby prop, straight up and down, with thinning hair and battered ears. Half his left ring finger is missing, amputated by a high-velocity bullet; and he walks with a limp because the second bullet came even closer to killing him.

We sit at a table overlooking the river. It’s low tide and gulls are fighting for scraps on the exposed mud.

‘How’s the Parkinson’s?’ he asks.

‘Like I’m always on vibrate.’

He smiles. ‘You’ve been saving that up.’

I notice a black band on his wrist. ‘What’s that?’

‘Miranda bought it for me,’ he replies.

‘What does it do?’

‘Tells me how far I’ve walked.’

‘You’re exercising?’

‘I prefer to think I’m earning my daily alcohol intake.’

Miranda is Ruiz’s ex-wife – his third – but they seem to have more sex and fewer arguments since they divorced.

‘She says I’m getting fat,’ he explains. ‘I have to do ten thousand steps a day.’

‘Ten thousand!’

‘If I walk to her house, I get a treat.’

‘Are you a man or a dog?’

‘Good question.’

‘So what’s the treat?’

‘I get to sleep over.’

‘She lives in Bayswater.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You could always catch the bus.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the problem. This thing has a GPS-style widget, which means Miranda can look at her computer and see exactly how far I’ve walked. Last week I paid the kid next door to go jogging but he went too far. Miranda smelled a rat. It cost me a hundred-quid dinner to make it up to her.’

‘And you think
I’m
hung up on a woman!’

‘At least I’m getting laid.’

I contemplate telling him that I’m staying at the cottage for a few weeks with Julianne, but it no longer seems like something to celebrate. Ruiz swallows the rest of his Guinness, pausing to belch quietly into his fist.

‘So why are you here?’ he asks.

‘This could be a social visit.’

‘We both know that’s not true.’

I’ve known Ruiz for nearly ten years – ever since he arrested me as a murder suspect. Since then we’ve become friends and sometimes help each other out – although I suspect the ledger favours him.

‘I’m working on a case,’ I say, explaining the reasons, trying not to sound as though I’m justifying them.

‘And where do I come into this?’

‘I need your help.’

Ruiz clears his throat, his voice gravelly. ‘Let me consult my diary.’ He licks the tip of his index finger and holds it up to the breeze. ‘I appear to be free.’

I buy him another Guinness before outlining the details of the case. On 6 June, between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., a mother and daughter were killed in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Clevedon – one stabbed, the other suffocated. There are six prime suspects: an ex-husband, his business partner, a stepson, the daughter’s boyfriend, a neighbour and one of the men who Elizabeth met through a dating agency. A second list compiled by the task force includes the names of all the registered sex offenders in the area with no alibi for the murders. A third list records everyone who had contact with Elizabeth and Harper in the preceding days – tradesmen, friends and visitors.

‘There’s another complication,’ I say. ‘Elizabeth may have invited a stranger home. She was known to frequent local dogging sites. You know what dogging is?’

‘I’m retired, not expired, Professor, but I don’t claim first-hand experience.’ Ruiz’s eyes are smiling. ‘Who’s in charge of the investigation?’

‘Ronnie Cray.’

‘How is the Fat Controller?’

‘She’s a chief superintendent now.’

‘All that hot air – she floated right to the top.’

‘Don’t be harsh.’

‘Does she know I’m coming on board?’

‘She suggested I call you.’

Ruiz knows I’m lying. ‘So what’s the brief?’