Fatlands (19 page)

‘I'll make it your Christmas bonus.'

‘Thanks. I'm OK really,' I said. ‘Just a bit shaky.'

He looked at me and frowned. ‘Take my advice, Hannah. Don't bury it until it's ready to be buried. It won't help.'

He was right. I already knew that. I took another sip of water. Then probed further than my gum. ‘I think I still feel frightened, Frank.'

‘Yeah, well that'll take longer to heal than your face. You know the worst thing? He's going to forget you a lot quicker than you forget him.'

‘Is that how it works?' I said quietly.

He looked away and there was almost an embarrassment about him, as if our intimacy had upset him. Our intimacy but his confession.

He shrugged. ‘Different strokes.'

Well, well. All the pints of beer and banter and I had never known. There was a small silence. I felt drowsy, but safe. Safer. ‘Who was he?' I said in the sure knowledge that I wouldn't be misunderstood.

Frank made a face. ‘Just some little punk I once nicked. A man with a vicious memory and a couple of friends.' He stopped. I wanted to ask, even though I wasn't sure I wanted to know. He looked up at me. ‘They were waiting for me in my car in an all-night multistorey. They hit me with a baseball bat. Bust both my arms, nearly bust my head. Then kicked a few ribs in. I don't remember a lot. '

‘Were you scared?'

The air between us was charged, like the beginning of a love scene. How extraordinary, I thought. Frank and I are having an affair. ‘Yes.' He nodded. ‘Yes, I was scared. I thought they were going to kill me.'

Secrets in the night. Such a big admission. ‘And afterwards?'

‘Afterwards I got angry. But it took a while. For a long time I was just glad to be alive.'

I wanted to ask how long. Add it to the list of questions. ‘What did you do?'

‘Spent some time in hospital. Took some leave. Went back to work.'

‘Did you get them?'

‘Oh yes, I got them. He pulled another job. Him and one of his friends. We got a tip-off.'

‘And you bust them?'

He nodded. I waited. ‘It was just him and me in the interrogation room. I hit him. Once in the stomach, once in the face. I hurt him.'

The earth moved beneath me. I couldn't even hear my heart beat. ‘Did it make you feel better?' I said it at last.

And he started to laugh. ‘I was shaking so much I had
to leave the room so he wouldn't see it. I had to hand the interrogation over to someone else. I … well, they finished it for me. I supposed they thought it was a favour. Can't say I feel good about that.' He stopped. ‘But that's the point. There is no good to be got out of it.'

I should have the luxury of such a doubt. What would I do? Even the idea of it made me shake.

He looked up at me. ‘The best thing you can say about it is, it passes. And you do get over it,' he said, already a man climbing back into his clothes, combing his hair, straightening up his tie. ‘I don't wake up at night any more. I can park in a multistorey car park without feeling sick. And his is not the face I expect to see in hell.' All dressed up and ready to go. A little bit of me was sad. This Frank and I might never meet again. But one-night stands can set a lot of the world to rights, as long as you understand that is what they are.

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘Think nothing of it.' I nodded. To look at us no one would know. ‘So, if you're up to it, you've got a couple of visitors.'

I shook my head. ‘I don't want to see him. Not yet.'

He shrugged. ‘He's in worse shape than you are.'

‘I know. That's why I need to wait.'

He nodded. ‘OK. Him I can stall. The others are going to be more difficult.'

‘I know you think I should tell them. And you're probably right. But not yet. Give me a little time.'

‘We don't have any more time, Hannah.'

I thought about it. ‘The local police won't know what to make of it, anyway.'

‘It's not local we're talking about. The London boys are up. Don Peters and Co. They want to talk to you about Tom Shepherd.'

‘Shepherd. Why?'

Frank looked at me. I suppose he thought it would come better from him than from them. ‘Because it seems you were the last person to see him before he injected himself full of poison.'

After they had left, I asked the nurse to give me something to make me sleep. And so Sunday became Monday, and brought time for reflection. The question was just how guilty was I going to let myself feel? I mean nobody forces anybody to take their own life. So I had told Tom Shepherd some unpalatable facts about his daughter. It couldn't have made him feel any worse than her death had done. Could it? It seemed to me he must have been planning it, anyway. Peters said the housekeeper had found him early next morning, and that according to the pathologist's initial report he'd been dead for at least eight hours. That left an afternoon and a bit of an evening. The local chemist's had no record of anyone buying any obvious kind of poison that day. Which meant whatever he used, he must have already had it hidden away in his bathroom closet. It was the method that chilled me most of all. So very scientific. But his choice. His life. Not my fault. No, not my fault. In the end not a question of guilt. Only a question of who exactly he had been phoning just after I left the house, and about what? Maybe when I hurt less, my brain would work better.

Frank's diagnosis of the stomach pains turned out to be a little premature, and they insisted I stay in for more tests. The pursuit of profit or the fear of malpractice suits? Private medicine. It was just what I needed to get my aggro level back up to scratch. Still, if someone else was paying for it … The interesting thing was who.

It seems news travels fast in the country. When the girl bartender and her boyfriend found me (we'll gloss over what they were doing out in the dark in the middle of the
night), they remembered enough from my public performance in the bar to know what to tell the local police, who then contacted Vandamed. Well, they didn't have much choice. At the hotel I had let Nick register us under his address, and all they got from his home number was an answering machine.

Of course, by rights, even without him they should have been able to get all the info they needed from my handbag. But that was the point. There was no handbag. Well, what would you do if you were a professional thug who wanted to make a beating-up look like a mugging? Except it was worse than that. Bags can be precious things. Driving licenses, cheque books, credit cards—all that kind of stuff is replaceable, and anyone who walks the mean streets without a duplicate address book is asking for trouble. But some things you can't replace: in this case a certain brown envelope containing a photograph of the man who had mugged me.

And, of course, once I thought about it that way, it all began to make sense. To say there was no point in beating me to a pulp so soon after the warning may have been logical, but only as far as it went. This way he had killed two birds with one stone. No Hannah, at least for a while, and no incriminating photo of himself. Brain as well as brawn, eh?

Of course, Vandamed would probably have a photograph of the student who had infiltrated them. But security mug shots always make people look like convicts, even the good-looking ones, and anyway, mine had been a more personal memento, not to mention the only real proof of the affair which had so effectively brought down the house of Shepherd.

Anyway, the fact was that as I lay unconscious in Ipswich Hospital the only person who knew anything about me was one Marion Ellroy, managing director of
Vandamed, plucked from his, no doubt, expensive bed to the bleak horrors of an NHS casualty ward. And from there the rest was private. Well, I already had ample evidence of how well Vandamed looked after its employees. In this case, even someone who hadn't agreed to go on the payroll. The flowers, the room, the medical care—it was all on them. Impressive, eh? And the kind of offer you couldn't refuse, particularly in my condition. I did the decent thing and wrote Ellroy a note to thank him. He, equally decent, did not try to visit me.

So I sat in my private room with my flowers, my television and my telephone while my face turned from black to blue and my eye opened enough for me to see the extent of the damage.

On Monday afternoon they offered me a hand mirror—I suppose they decided I was ready. But some things you can't share, even with professionals. So a little while later I made my own solitary visit to the bathroom. And there, above the sink, made the acquaintance of the new Hannah Wolfe.

You never really know how vain you are until you lose the looks you've got. Maybe the worst thing about what I saw was that I was still recognizable. I think I'd had this fantasy that the violence had somehow transformed me, turned me into someone else, someone ennobled by suffering, and that this new spirituality would shine through the pulp of my face. Well, it didn't.

The main problem was not so much the smashed lip or the bruises, as the fact that there was just too much flesh. My whole face had blown up like puff pastry, as if to protect the bones from any more damage. Maybe that was why my eye had closed, in preparation for another crack of the fist. In its place there was a long, livid gash held together by a couple of stitches and an expanding purple-black bruise which dragged the side of my cheek down
towards my mashed lip. Altogether a stunning sight. Gone were the pleasures of working incognito. From now on the private eye had an all too public face.

I thought of Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
pulling Faye Dunaway into bed with a slashed nostril and sticking-plaster: injured hero, aroused heroine, a symbolic variation on a common genre theme. I put my hand up to the mirror, running my finger from my split lip up to the line of the eye. ‘Why, Miss Wolfe, I do declare I just love that cute little scar.' But some kind of gender equalities are simply impossible. And my Southern accent left a lot to be desired. The more I looked the better it didn't get. I would have cried, only the salt would hurt the stitches too much.

After the second day I stopped looking. There wasn't any point. I wasn't going anywhere. And, after all, someone else was doing the work now.

Considering how little I had told him, DI Peters had been quite civilized about it. Well, you can hardly hit a lady when she's down, and, anyway, I got the impression it was no more than he expected from an employee of Frank Comfort's. Of course he was still not to know whether this new truth was the whole truth. But that was his own fault, really. He should have waited till the painkillers had begun to work and my head was less fuzzy. As it was he just jumped too quickly, got so excited about the gardener and the envelope with the leaflets and photo that he didn't give me time to get back to that ‘forgotten' phone call that Mattie had taken that night in her father's study.

I didn't feel too badly about it. After all, at least they had a lead now. They moved fast. When they couldn't trace either student Malcolm Barringer or gardener Tony Marriot to any known animal rights activist groups, they made a public appeal. The day I was due to be released the
papers carried a small, blurred photograph of a young man somewhere between the age of eighteen and thirty. Vandamed's mug shot—as I predicted—was a joke, apparently a completely different person from my moody black-and-white love study. To add insult to injury, Peters let the Debringham College schoolgirls loose on an Identikit picture for a television crimewatch programme. Their version—a cross between Christian Slater and Ian Brady—looked like yet someone else entirely. According to Frank, the boys got over six hundred calls from people who were sure they knew him. Police work. The indefatigable in search of the indistinguishable. Sometimes it pays to be a one-man band.

And so I was allowed to go home and pick up the pieces of my life—the largest one of which was Nick. As you know he had waited all through Sunday night to see me. Frank had stalled him, but it was left to the pretty young nurse to do my dirty work for me, assuring him that it was only natural for me not to want to be seen by my lover in my present state. ‘Give it a couple of days,'she no doubt said. ‘She just needs a little time.' And, of course, as an excuse it was not without its truth. You and the bathroom mirror both know that. But you also know it wasn't the whole truth.

Except it could only get worse the longer I left it. So I rang him on Monday night and agreed that we would meet in London when I got home. He had left his car for me. Maybe he'd hoped I would ask him to drive me back, but he understood when I said I wanted to drive myself. I knew he would.

I liked the drive. It gave me a chance to be alone but in the world again, and, truth be told, I was quite grateful to get out from under the roses. There can be such a thing as too many flowers. If I had been nearer, I might even have gone back to the pub, just to have a look at the lane
in daylight, exorcise my demons. But the A12 beckoned and it didn't make me a coward to listen to its call. Apart from odd moments at traffic lights when I would find the driver next to me staring uncontrollably, the journey home was uneventful. It was early evening by the time I arrived. I parked outside my flat. The lights were on and the curtains drawn. But then you have to expect that when you give someone your key. The only people I had seen for three days were policemen, nurses and doctors. What the hell was I going to do with a lover?

I climbed the stairs slowly. He must have heard me, because he was waiting in the doorway. It reminded me of that time at his house a couple of days after her death, when I had been so unexpectedly pleased to see him. We stood for a second looking at each other. He made no move towards me. ‘Hi, Hannah, welcome home,' he said quietly, then stood aside to let me in.

The flat felt warm, I went into the living room. It was unbelievably clean and filled with flowers (no roses, thank God) and, wonder of wonders, the curtain rail had flown back up to its rightful place above the window sill and the wall around it had been redecorated. It was a great testament to the power of recovery.