The Watcher (18 page)

Luke stood up, hoping that his wobbly legs would carry him. He had to call the police. Hopefully the phone was working. As he remembered, it was in the living room. He was still afraid, but he told himself that in all probability Anne had been lying dead for a week and that it was unlikely that her killer was still around. He managed to think calmly and rationally about the situation, although deep down he was surprised at his calm. Only later did he realise that he must have been in shock.

As he crept downstairs he murmured the emergency number to himself, ‘Nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine.’

He must not forget that number now.

‘I made a stupid mistake,’ said John. ‘In the months that followed, I could have slapped myself for it every day. I was an idiot. She was a student at Hendon Police College. I was a detective inspector with the Met. She was doing an internship with me. No way should I have started something.’

Outside the snow was falling more and more thickly. It looked as though the world was going under. Even here in London all sounds were muffled. An almost festive silence hung in the air.

John’s bedroom in the spacious but sparsely furnished flat in Stratford contained a wardrobe and a mattress on the floor. There were no curtains at the windows, no carpet on the wooden floor. A few magazines lay scattered around. In the corner there was a half-drunk bottle of mineral water.

Gillian had thrown back the cover because she was too warm, even though the radiator only gave out a little heat. She felt peaceful and relaxed, although she knew that she was facing a heap of problems. One of them, and perhaps the most urgent, was the issue of whether she would manage to get home before Tom, now that the snow was falling so heavily. Less urgent but of long-term significance was the situation she had got herself into: she had started an affair with another man. It was unlikely that it would not lead to one difficulty after another.

After spending so long considering, doubting and worrying about the meeting in the last week, everything had happened so quickly and inevitably in the end. She had rung John’s doorbell and he had opened the door immediately, taken her hand and led her in. He had looked happy and relieved to see her.

‘Until right now I was afraid you weren’t coming.’

‘I couldn’t do anything else,’ Gillian said. She had thought again and again that she would cancel and let the whole adventure evaporate, but now she realised that she had never really had the chance to do that. She was already in it far deeper than she had thought.

He was still holding on to her hand. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘Afterwards,’ she said. In the next moment she thought:
Oh God, Gillian, you didn’t really say that! All your friends would be shocked. It’s even embarrassing to you.

He looked puzzled, then he raised his eyebrows. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, then.’

He helped her out of her coat and they went to his spartanly decorated bedroom. Gillian had not had sex for almost a year. Suddenly she regretted nothing so much as her brazen insistence on going to bed with John immediately. No doubt she would be completely inept.

‘Maybe . . . I would prefer a coffee,’ she murmured.

He smiled. ‘As you wish.’

She took a step backwards. Why did she always become someone different from who she was when she was around him? She flirted, provoked him, went on the attack, giving him the come-on. And then she retreated and felt ridiculous.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’

He looked at her expectantly.

‘I’m not like that,’ Gillian continued. ‘I mean, not like you’ve seen me. When I’m with you I always say and do things that don’t suit me. I’m a stranger to myself. I don’t know why.’

He stretched out an arm. Gently he drew a line with his finger from her chin, over her neck and down the V of her pullover. Gillian could not stop a shiver running down her spine.

‘Have you ever thought that it might be the other way round?’ he asked. ‘That the Gillian who is so frank and direct is the real Gillian? And the other one, the one from your normal everyday life, is the stranger?’

Perplexed, she had nothing to say. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was more of the shy, convention-bound girl in her than she would have liked. Perhaps she was still not free of her upbringing, which above all had taught her to be cautious. Perhaps she would never be completely free of it.

‘Of course I don’t want to manipulate you,’ said John.

‘I won’t let myself be manipulated,’ replied Gillian.

I’ve just got this one moment
, she thought.
If I dodge it, have a coffee and then drive home, I’ll never do it again. There will never again be a situation like this one.

‘I want to sleep with you,’ she said.

He wrapped his arms around her. ‘Lucky me,’ he whispered. ‘I would barely have been able to stand anything else.’

When it was over, after an eternity, when they were both completely exhausted and had perhaps even fallen asleep for a moment, John opened his eyes and said that he loved her.

Gillian looked at him and realised that he was serious.

She had fallen asleep again and just woken up when John got up and left the room. She watched him come back with two big mugs. They drank the coffee looking out at the snow falling more and more thickly. Gillian could see the roof of the house across the road. A Christmas star hung in a dormer window. Above it the snow was piling up in a powdery crest.

‘Why don’t you have a real bed, anyway?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘If you look around my flat, you’ll see I barely have any furniture. I must have some sort of block.’

‘Block?’

He laughed. ‘Can you imagine me in a furniture shop? Buying wall-to-wall cupboards, a coffee table and a rug? Everything I own I’ve bought in second-hand shops. It’s the bare minimum. If things get too comfily middle-class, it feels wrong to me.’

‘Was it always like that?’

He guessed what she wanted to ask. ‘You mean, does it have something to do with my job? Or rather, with the fact that I had to give it up?’

‘It was a sudden break.’

‘But not one that changed me as a person. I’ve always been like this. Pretty unconventional. If I wasn’t, I expect I wouldn’t have got into this mess.’

‘You wanted to tell me about it,’ said Gillian.

He played with her hair, looking at her but miles away in his thoughts.

‘Yes,’ he said, in the end. ‘I think I can tell you about it.’

Then he started to talk about his mistake. The mistake that had changed his life.

‘But what she wanted to pin on me, the sexual assault, that just wasn’t true. We had a fling. She wanted it as much as me. Her signals were crystal clear. It was just stupid of me to go along with it.’

‘How long were you together?’

‘For about four months. We had a good time. She was young and attractive, and I just really liked being with her.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I was thirty-seven. She was twenty-one. I thought . . . well, I thought we were just having some fun and then one day she’d meet someone closer to her own age and she’d marry him . . . I was just enjoying the moment.’

‘When did it all change?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘When she failed one of the exams. She was really gifted, actually. She just had a bad day. She screwed up a particularly important piece of work. But it was no big deal, really. She only needed to repeat the module. No one would have given a monkey’s about it later. But . . . she lost it completely. She couldn’t accept it. She implored me to sort it out. To speak to the examiner, to make him give her a pass, to revise his mark, who knows what.’

Gillian shook her head. ‘And you couldn’t do that.’

‘Of course not. That’s not how things work. I explained that to her. But she wasn’t listening to me.’ He shook his head. It seemed to her that he was still shaking his head at this situation in which he had found himself back then. ‘She went bonkers. She threatened to go public with our relationship if I didn’t help her out. I still couldn’t do what she asked. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to.’

‘And so how did it come to assault?’

‘There was no assault,’ John stated again. ‘I just wanted to end the relationship. There was no point any more. Unfortunately I was stupid enough to . . .’ He stopped speaking.

‘To what?’ asked Gillian.

‘I was stupid enough to sleep with her again. While I was actually trying to end things. It was complicated. I don’t know why I did it.’

‘Probably because she was a hot young woman,’ said Gillian in a level voice.

He sighed. ‘Yes. You’re right. In any case, that’s when she realised that nothing was going to change. That it was still over between us. And then she got completely hysterical. Suddenly she claimed that she had not wanted sex this last time. Screamed rape and ran to my boss. There was an investigation. The case even went to the Crown Prosecution.’

‘And you were in it deep.’

‘You could say that. It was easy to prove that we had had sex. I never denied it. I just kept on saying that it was consensual. She had given herself injuries and acted just like you would imagine a traumatised woman would act. What was more, I had been her boss during her internship. I had not done anything illegal by starting something with her, but I had broken any number of unwritten rules. I was temporarily suspended from the force.’

‘But you could prove your innocence, couldn’t you?’

‘No. In cases like this you can’t
prove
anything. Luckily there were several medical reports that treated the injuries on her body with great scepticism. The reports said that she had certainly given herself some of the injuries, and maybe all of them. She had also contradicted herself a lot in her story. The prosecutor could not find proof enough to bring the case. It never reached court.’

‘But you still had to leave?’

‘I could have stayed. But one thing was clear. I had to take responsibility for what had happened. I should never have started something with her. The mistake, the guilt were mine. I resigned pretty soon after that. I knew that the incident would stick to me like a bad smell. And I was just so tired of the whole situation. Of my colleagues’ hypocrisy, their pitying or gleeful looks, the gossip . . . I just wanted to get out. To this day I’m glad I did.’

‘Are you? Really?’

‘Absolutely – no question! I started this private security firm. I’m independent. My own boss. That’s how I like to live. I just can’t do the whole servile thing in a hierarchy full of intrigue, favouritism and arse-lickers. I realised that late, but luckily for me, not too late.’

She looked closely at him, asking herself if he really felt that way or if he was just saying it to help him deal with his situation.

‘Why did you go into the force in the first place?’

‘Idealism,’ he said. ‘I wanted to protect good people and catch the baddies. That was at the start. Of course, after doing the job for a while, you quickly lose some of that attitude. But I suppose that’s always the way it goes. In most jobs, I mean.’

‘The children who you coach . . .’

He laughed. ‘OK. That’s what’s left of my idealism. I’m convinced that it’s possible to take children and young people off the streets, to keep them from hanging around. Their energies can be steered in better directions. It’s boredom and a senseless drifting through the day that can make them susceptible to bad things like drugs and violence and to an inability to live their lives with focus and dedication. In my opinion, sport is the best way to learn that. It’s what I can offer them. And it works.’

‘Why Southend? Why so far out of London?’

‘I tried two London clubs first. There was no end of problems when people found out that I’d been in the police, and why I’d left. In the end I just decided to go a little further out in the hope that it would be harder for people to know about my past. There aren’t as many problem families here. Of course I also coach kids who are not at risk, but some of them I can really help. And it’s good that I can, isn’t it?’

He took her mug out of her hand and put it down on the floor next to the mattress. Then he enveloped her in his arms. ‘If I hadn’t gone to Southend, I wouldn’t have met you, would I? And that,’ he said as he started to kiss her, ‘would have been a real shame.’

They made love once more. It was completely dark outside and in the room when they let go of each other. Gillian realised that she could barely keep her eyes open. Her last waking thought was
Whatever I do, I can’t fall asleep again
. And with that she slipped into sleep. She could not help herself. She was very happy and very tired.

When she woke up, nothing had changed. It was dark, and in the light of the street lamp outside the window she could see the snow falling. She looked at her watch and got a shock. It was half past eight. Tom would be back home by ten. She only had an hour and a half to get home and have a good shower. Seeing as it had been snowing uninterruptedly for the last five hours, she wondered anxiously how difficult the journey back might be.

She could hear John breathing deeply next to her. She stood up without a sound, slipped into her clothes and took her handbag. She tiptoed out of the room. There was no furniture in the flat’s long hallway, just a coat rack on the wall. Her winter coat was on top and her boots beneath it.

She was just getting her coat on when John appeared next to her, with a towel wrapped around his waist. ‘You’re going already? I wanted to cook for us. Have a glass of wine with you . . .’

She shook her head. ‘My husband is getting home soon. I’m already late. Apart from that, I’m scared I’ll get stuck in the snow. It’s snowing like crazy out there.’

‘Should I drive you?’

‘No. I’ll be all right.’

He took her face between his hands. ‘When will we see each other again?’

‘I’ll call you,’ said Gillian.

She arrived home at exactly the same time as Tom, after a nightmare of a drive that more than once looked like it would never end. Snowdrifts, cars blocking the road, gridlock. She had been cursing the whole way as she saw her head start over Tom diminishing to nothing and because she had become absolutely convinced that she needed to shower. She smelt of John. She smelt of sex.