Die of Shame (9 page)

Tony’s wife rang when he was in the queue for the checkout.

‘We need fresh spinach,’ she said. ‘And pancetta.’

‘I’m just about to pay.’

‘Might as well get some more mozzarella while you’re at it.’

Tony sighed and stepped out of the queue, asked his wife if there was anything else as he walked back into one of the crowded aisles. More often than not, the weekend shop on a Saturday morning fell to him, and though there were always crowds to negotiate and parking spaces to fight for he’d come to look forward to it. Once the shopping was done, he would deposit the bags in the boot of his car then enjoy half an hour or so in the Crocodile Gallery café with the newspaper. A double espresso and an almond croissant, then a crafty cigarette afterwards.

He relished the routine.

‘Why were there police here yesterday?’

‘What?’ Tony waited for a shopper to move, then reached for the spinach.

Nina asked the question again.

‘How did you know about that?’

‘Emma heard them talking when she came down to use the bathroom. Weren’t you going to mention it?’

‘When, exactly?’ Tony said. ‘I was in bed whatever time you got back last night and you were asleep when I left this morning.’ He realised he was heading in the wrong direction, executed a tricky turn and began pushing the trolley towards the deli counter.

‘So, go on then.’

‘A client died.’ It was hard to manoeuvre with one hand, so he tucked the phone between his chin and his neck. ‘Was murdered, actually.’ He could not bear the unsteadiness, the feeling that the phone would slip and fall at any moment, so he stopped and pushed the trolley hard against the edge of the aisle. ‘One of the women in my Monday night group.’

‘Which one?’

Tony took the phone from his ear and looked at it.
HOME
. A picture of Nina and Emma. The duration of the call ticking by in seconds.

Which one?
Not
Oh God that’s terrible
. Not
Fuck
or
Bloody hell
.
Which one
. He became aware of a woman staring and mumbled a sorry as he nudged his trolley forward so that she could get at the tinned fish.

‘Can we talk about this when I get home?’

‘Whatever you like,’ Nina said. ‘Can you see if they’ve got any edamame beans? If not, they do them in Waitrose…’

Forty minutes later, Tony was unpacking the shopping in his kitchen: squashing down packaging into the recycling bin; balling up the empty carrier bags then pushing them inside a bigger plastic bag that was hanging in one of the cupboards.

‘Which one was Heather?’ Seated at the central island, Nina was looking at something on her iPad and brushing toast crumbs from her dressing gown.

‘The one who gave you a filthy look, remember?’ Tony held up a pot of edamame beans. Nina blew a kiss in his direction. ‘The one you said looked like a boy.’

‘Do they think it was drug related?’

‘I don’t know what they think.’

‘Every chance though, don’t you reckon?’

‘Well, I’m sure it’s something they’re considering,’ Tony said. ‘But they know she definitely wasn’t using when she was killed.’

Nina scrolled and swiped. ‘Feather in your cap, anyway.’

‘Yeah.’ Tony carried the multipacks of bottled water through to the utility room. He felt a flush spreading across his chest, a shard of guilt pressing at his breastbone. He had said something similar, shutting the door on that policeman the day before.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Nina asked when he came back into the kitchen. ‘About the group.’

‘I’ve put it on hold for a while.’

‘Probably a good idea. I mean, you’re not a grief counsellor, are you?’

It still surprised Tony how little she understood the work he did, and he might have said something if he had the slightest interest in his wife’s latest cutting edge campaign for bras or biscuits. The truth was that for many recovering from serious drug addiction, grief was exactly what they felt. Mourning the drug they had loved and been loved by; mourning the part of themselves that had died when they’d left it behind.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

When he had spoken to each of the surviving members of the group the day before and broken the news about Heather, he had simply told them that they should take a short break while they processed their loss. Robin had been sanguine about it, but Tony guessed that was because he had NA meetings and other support groups in place. Caroline had said she understood, which was not surprising since she was still a relative newcomer and not as bedded in or dependent as some of the others. Diana and Chris had seemed the most disturbed at the thought of a hiatus, and, though he couldn’t promise, Tony had agreed to try to fit in individual sessions for them both until such time as the group was reconvened.

Until he was ready to reconvene it, because the truth was that Tony himself did not feel able to carry on immediately.

‘I can smell the cigarettes, by the way,’ Nina said.

Tony turned away from her. He walked across to the sink and began washing his hands. ‘I was stressed, all right? Upset. I’ve lost a client.’

‘Well, what’s that, thirty-five pounds a week? I’m sure you’ll fill the gap quickly enough.’

‘Are you joking?’

‘Of course I am. And I meant, I can smell the cigarettes every Saturday.’

‘Come on. Once a week.’

‘Is that really a good idea?’

‘It’s a treat, that’s all.’

‘Oh, that’s OK, then,’ Nina said. ‘You should probably have a few drinks while you’re at it, maybe a line of coke, wake up in a skip.’

‘You’re being daft.’

Tony dried his hands on the tea towel; rubbed and rubbed long after they were dry and until he heard Nina say something about going for a shower. He turned round to see her hugging their daughter as the two of them passed in the doorway.

Emma mumbled a ‘Morning’.

He walked across to hug her himself; squeezed and tried to remember the last time he’d felt her skinny arms curl around his back. Then he sat down and tried to stay calm while she made herself breakfast.

There had been a bout of bulimia several years before, and though that particular issue with food seemed to have passed, though his daughter was eating, watching her do so was like observing a series of delicate and defined rituals being carried out by a chimp.

It was precise, and utterly chaotic.

The ingredients of each meal would change every few months or so, but would remain constant for weeks on end, breakfast, lunch and dinner, until Emma finally grew sick of them or developed an obsession with something else. Today, it was – still – miniature frankfurters, cherry tomatoes, raw baby sweetcorn, finely sliced pickles. There were plenty of all these in the fridge as Tony had taken care to stock up at the supermarket an hour before. Though the components of the meal were all small enough to begin with – making his daughter’s hands look like those of a giant as she worked at them – she took great pains to make each piece smaller still. The tiny sausages were cut carefully into tinier slices, the tomatoes into quarters that could be hidden beneath a thimble, and it was not until this work had been satisfactorily completed and each element of her meal comprehensively reduced that she would eat any of it.

Then the chaos would begin.

She ate with her fingers, or sometimes from the blade of a knife. She swigged water from a bottle and ate directly from whichever surface she was in front of, dispensing completely with crockery of any sort until, when she had finished, there was usually as much food smeared across whatever she was wearing as there was on the worktop or scattered on the floor around her.

‘It’s getting ridiculous,’ Tony had told Nina. ‘She’s like a baby.’

‘Your area, not mine,’ Nina had said.

It was the cobbler’s kid with no shoes again and Tony was growing tired of it. He wanted to talk about why, but fought shy of talking about the kind of female body image people in advertising traded in or bringing up the umpteen stupid diets Nina had been on since Emma had been born. No, his job was to sort out the mess, same as always, and it only served to highlight yet again, how little Nina understood what he did, or could be bothered to try.

Now, watching Emma pick up a slice of sausage no bigger than a penny and bite it very carefully in half, Tony remembered a session he’d done in a prison not long after he’d begun working as a therapist. Fresh-faced – well fresh-ish – and full of newly acquired buzzwords and homilies to go along with the piss and vinegar.

‘I’m not interested in slapping on a sticking plaster,’ he’d told them. ‘I don’t want to cover up the wound. I want to know why that wound’s there in the first place so we can avoid another one.’

A prisoner who, up until that point had looked friendly enough had leaned towards him and quietly said, ‘I’ll wound you in a minute, you soppy twat.’

Tony had spent the rest of the session shaking so much that he could barely hold his notes.

‘Mum says you could hear what those coppers were saying down here yesterday.’

He was a lot more resilient these days.

Emma glanced up. ‘Yeah, but only a bit. I could see them outside though, when they left. They looked like coppers.’

Tony watched her eat for half a minute. A slice of pickle, a quarter of a tomato, a measured swig of water between each. ‘Can you hear when I do my sessions?’

‘What?’

‘When we’re in the conservatory. Sometimes we can hear when you come down to play the piano.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Nobody’s told me it bothers them yet,’ Tony said. ‘I just wondered, if we can hear you, can you hear what’s going in the group? You know, when you’ve finished playing.’

Emma shrugged. ‘I usually go straight back upstairs.’

‘What about the sessions I have in my office?’

She sighed. ‘What about them?’

‘Can you hear what’s being said? I know you usually have your music on.’

‘Why would I be interested in what you and your junkies are on about?’

‘I just asked if you could hear, that’s all. You do understand that these conversations are supposed to be confidential, right?’

Emma looked up at him, seemingly furious that he was continuing to interrupt precious eating time with inane questions. ‘A. Why would I give a shit? And B. Who would I tell?’

‘Fine,’ Tony said. ‘Good.’ There was little point trying to read anything into his daughter’s reaction. She would probably have been equally obstreperous had he enquired about her plans for the rest of the weekend or made some innocuous comment about the weather.

She was seventeen.

Emma finished eating and left without any further conversation. When she had gone, Tony spent five minutes cleaning up after her, then went upstairs to his office. The shower was still running in the en suite and he could hear the murmurings of his daughter on the phone in her room. He listened, but could make out no more than the odd word or exclamation.

He looked at the birthday invitation that Heather had given him weeks before, still pinned up on the cork board above his desk.

His name in swirly red and blue letters. Stars and smiley faces.

A few minutes after the shower stopped running, he heard Nina calling from the bedroom.

‘Fancy going to the pictures tonight? Why don’t you have a look, see what’s on?’

Tony shouted back and told her that he would. Then he reached for the invitation, took it down and put it away in a drawer.

‘We could probably walk it in twenty, twenty-five minutes,’ Chall said.

Had she been alone, Tanner would have made the journey from Soho back to the office on foot, without question. She had done so many times, in fact, coming back from the West End: along Piccadilly then down through the park and straight past Buckingham Palace. Tanner liked to walk, but any pleasure it might have given her would now be tempered by the need to make concessions. It was certainly not personal, because Chall was an officer in whose company she was generally more than comfortable, but twenty-five minutes was just too long a time to spend at the mercy of somebody else’s walking pace. Their desire to chat.

‘Nice enough weather for it,’ Chall said.

Within a few minutes they were on a train heading west towards Green Park. Saturday lunchtime, and though the carriages were not quite as busy as they were during weekday rush hours, they were still crowded with excited tourists en route to Hyde Park or Harrods, as well as those heading further afield and already looking beaten down by the seemingly interminable Piccadilly line journey to Heathrow.

‘So, you think he was high?’ Chall asked.

They were strap-hanging by the small doors at the end of the carriage. The sergeant waited until the movement of the train eased him gently back towards his boss.

‘Clemence.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Tanner said.

‘That kid certainly was. The one outside, pulling faces. Might explain why he hangs around with them.’

‘The fan club?’ It was the reason Tanner had asked Chris Clemence the question. Those who were genuinely trying to stay off drugs did not tend to associate with those who were still using them.

‘When he says ups and downs, maybe he’s talking about ketamine or MDMA. Easy route back in if that’s what you’re looking for and you haven’t got much to spend.’

Tanner knew that Chall was right, because she had seen it before. Teenagers using drugs recreationally were much more likely to dole out a tab or two to a virtual stranger than any junkie would be to share gear with his closest friend. She nodded. ‘Right, and even if Clemence isn’t high now, who’s to say he wasn’t off his tits three weeks ago?’

At Green Park they changed lines, following the crowds heading southbound via Victoria. In a busy carriage they managed to bag adjoining seats opposite a young couple all but obscured by the large rucksacks on their laps. Tanner guessed they were heading for the coach station, which she knew well because it was virtually next door to the police station. Whatever time Tanner arrived at work, there would usually be a rat-arsed backpacker wandering around somewhere near the entrance to the nick.

It wasn’t quite so easy to spot those whose purpose on the streets around Buckingham Palace Road was altogether darker, but Tanner knew they were there. Men and women waiting to offer a helping hand to the young boy with no money fresh off a coach from Leeds, or cut-price accommodation to the teenage girl just arrived from Glasgow and desperate for work. A ‘welcome to London’ smile from those looking to acquire human stock cheaply, for whom Victoria coach station was the closest thing the likes of them had to a cash and carry.

Tanner wondered if Victoria coach station had been Heather Finlay’s first view of London when she’d arrived from Sheffield all those years before.

‘What is it they’re all so busy writing anyway?’ Chall asked. ‘On those bloody laptops.’

‘Sorry?’

‘People in coffee shops.’

‘What about them?’

‘What are they doing? Like that woman, just now. You can’t get a seat most of the time because they’re just sitting there for hours on end, tapping away like it’s really important.’

‘Sending email?’ Tanner had never given the subject a moment’s thought and found that she was unable to care about it now that she had. ‘Watching porn?’

‘Writing novels,’ Chall said, nodding. ‘Or
wanting
everyone to think they’re writing novels. I mean, Jesus, if they can afford three and a half quid for a latte you’d think they could afford Wi-Fi at home.’

‘Maybe some people need to get away from home.’

Chall thought about it, but not for very long. ‘Write what you know. That’s what they say writers should do, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, if that’s true, how come there aren’t a lot more novels about losers who spend their lives sitting in sodding coffee shops?’

Tanner had stopped listening, but smiled, because Chall was a decent bloke and the look on his face made it obvious that’s what he was expecting.

A few minutes later, coming out on to the street at Victoria, she was thinking that, whether or not that advice was useful to writers, using your experience was what any sensible copper did. Tanner’s experience still led her to believe that drugs had played some part in Heather Finlay’s murder, and the fact that Heather had almost certainly known her killer meant that Tanner was keen to track down everyone else in that Monday night recovery group. Perhaps Christopher Clemence was not the only one to have had ups and downs.

‘I want a name and address for this anaesthetist by the end of the day,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ Chall said.

Tanner’s experience told her that such confidence could often be the kiss of death, but on this occasion she chose to ignore it. Passing the coach station, she caught the eye of a young girl carrying a backpack almost as big as she was, smoking with friends near the entrance. Tanner didn’t know if the girl had just got off a coach or was about to board one. She found herself hoping that it was the latter.