The Various Haunts of Men (47 page)

‘Freya? Good afternoon, how nice to have got straight through to you.’ The
rather prissy and cultivated voice identified itself.

‘Aidan … how are you?’

‘Isn’t this the most miraculous weather? Doesn’t it make your heart lift?’

‘It does. The whole of CID is plotting a daring breakout.’

‘I can’t offer an escape to the sun, I’m afraid, but I did wonder if you would have a drink with me this evening? I don’t know what time you finish but I have to see a late patient.
I’ll be free by six thirty.’

She hesitated. This was a social invitation, and any reason she had to meet Aidan Sharpe was professional. She had no interest in forming a closer relationship. On the other hand, what else did she have on this evening? Besides, there was no reason why she shouldn’t combine work and relaxation in some small measure.

‘That would be very nice. Thank you. Where would
you like to meet?’

‘There is a very pleasant new bar in the Ross Hotel.’

‘The Embassy Room? I’ve heard about it … not been though.’

‘Good. Shall we meet there at six forty-five?’

Nathan was looking at her with interest as she put down the phone. Freya shook her head.

‘Uh-huh. It’s sort of work.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Right – it’s Mr Bow Tie, Nathan.’

‘Got you. Still, swish place.’

‘So I’m told.’

‘Sting him for one of them cocktails with little brollies.’

‘OK. Right now, I’m going for a cuppa.’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Nathan jumped up on to his desk and off the other side.

‘Tell you what, Sarge – I’ll take Em there and ask her.’

‘Wait till I’ve sussed it out.’

‘Yeah, if I’m going to go for it, it’s got to be pukka, know what I mean?’

Nathan’s monkey face was lit up with excitement.
Freya felt a sudden pang of – what? Envy? Loneliness? A feeling of missing out?

‘Lucky Em,’ she said.

Nathan went ahead of her down the concrete stairs two at a time.

The waiting room was empty, the magazines tidied up in neat piles, edge to edge, and the cover was on the receptionist’s computer. Karin sat down. It was very quiet, very tidy, but for some reason, despite the pleasant if bland watercolours, the room felt lifeless rather than peaceful.

She was tense which made the pain in her back worse.

The clock was an electric one, and the windows
were double-glazed, the carpet thick, so that the room was strangely silent.

Because she was Cat’s patient, and because he had met Karin socially, Aidan Sharpe had given her an immediate appointment at the end of his working day, and she was grateful. But now that she was here Karin felt uneasy. She had been sailing along in such a blithe way, ignoring the facts, forcing herself into a positive
frame of mind, refusing to acknowledge the existence of any shadows, let alone peer into them. It was catching up with her.

The sun had gone from the room. Karin thought she
might get up and leave. Oh, for God’s sake.

‘Mrs McCafferty, I’m so sorry to keep you.’

She stood up. ‘Karin,’ she said, though they had not managed to speak much at the Serraillers’ dinner party.

‘Do come through.’

Every consulting room she had been into during her weeks of exploration into complementary therapies had been warm, welcoming, informal – many of them had been what she thought of as ‘real’ rooms in ordinary houses, like the bright, peaceful, flower-filled living room in which her spiritual healer worked. She liked that. Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries were so cold, so bleak, so bare. The scanner
room, the oncologist’s consulting room, the radiotherapy waiting room – she had wanted to run out of them all.

Aidan Sharpe’s surgery discomfited her. Though there was nothing particularly unusual about its pastel blandness, it did not feel relaxing, calming at all.

She stood uncertainly.

He wore a white coat, high at the neck.

‘Cat gave me your scan results. I gather you are having some back
pain?’

‘Yes.’ No, Karin wanted to say. Her throat tightened.

‘Is it painful intermittently or most of the time?’

He had a folder in his hand and glanced down at a sheet he had slipped out of it. Her scan results, presumably.

‘I don’t get a lot of respite from it. It varies in intensity though, depending on what I’m doing.’

‘Is it worse standing, sitting or lying? Is it worse when you’re moving
about or being still?’

‘I can distract myself by moving about.’

‘I see. Right. If you’d like to go behind that screen and
take off your things down to your underwear and slip on the robe hanging up there?’

The room had seemed to be silent but when Karin lay down on the high couch, she heard the faintest humming sound, as if the floor beneath her were charged with some high-pitched electricity.

Aidan Sharpe sat on the high stool beside her and took her hand to feel her pulse. Karin looked up. His eyes were staring not at her but into her. They were extraordinary eyes, cold, small, like little hard stones, and the lids veiled them slightly.

A terrible sensation rose up from deep in her stomach, through her chest and into her throat. It was fear, it was nausea, it was a sense of entrapment.
She remembered the conversation she had had in the car with Cat. She wanted to pull herself up, throw herself off the couch on to the floor and run, now, wrench open the doors and race out into the safety and open air of the street.

The nausea was like bile in her mouth.

His gaze was absolutely steady on her face. He scarcely blinked. ‘Your pulse is very unsteady.’

Her tongue was swollen like
a cow’s, huge in her mouth. She moved her head slightly. In the ceiling above, the fluorescent light was white-blue and pulsating gently.

She heard the sound of metal on metal. Aidan Sharpe had let her wrist go and reached out his hand to the tray of meticulously arranged small needles. He selected one and, turning back, looked down at her again. The eyes were so odd, narrowed yet staring and
strangely expressionless. He smelled faintly of antiseptic, faintly of masculine soap, and yet Karin smelled nothing but the smell of death. Her head swam.

‘Relax, please.’

The needle touched her temple and a hot pain shot through her back.

‘Good.’

Another needle, beside her left nostril and the same back pain, lower down.

— Jesus, God, help me — Karin thought.

She realised that no one else
was in the building. The receptionist had long gone home, she was the last patient of the day. She sensed the rest of Aidan Sharpe’s house, empty and silent stretching back beyond the walls of the surgery.

There were more needles, carefully positioned. After a few moments, she began to feel drowsy, and light-headed, as if she had been given a hypnotic. The pain in her back had gone but her legs
felt heavy and numb.

Aidan Sharpe continued to stare at her as he worked but he did not speak.

The needles seemed to be pinning her to the couch so that she was afraid to attempt the slightest movement, afraid that her flesh would be torn and the hair ripped from her scalp. She was hot and very thirsty.

She looked up. His eyes were more needles, penetrating her skull. She had lost all sense
of time. Hours might have passed or only a few moments.

She wondered if anyone knew where she was. The appointment had been made over the telephone, which she had answered when alone in the house. She did not think she had even jotted a note of it down. No one else had rung, Mike was away, she was not expected anywhere that evening. Why am I thinking like this? she thought, and made a tremendous
effort not to sink down and down but to struggle up, towards the surface of
consciousness and control. Aidan Sharpe was very still.

‘You may feel a little light-headed.’ His voice was soft.

Karin tried to speak.

‘Don’t move please.’

Something in his voice warned her to do as he asked, some cold, dry thing lacking all emotion, but infinitely powerful.

Now, her chest seemed to be cracking open
as she tried to get her breath, and her lungs hurt as the air rasped quickly in and out of them, and her head was swimming and full of vapour, her limbs were losing sensation, except for her fingers which were tingling as if pricked all over by tiny pins. She became aware of Aidan Sharpe reaching down to her. She saw the pattern of small jazzy yellow commas on the navy surface of his bow tie.
It confused her eyes.

‘Don’t try to sit up.’

His hands were on her arms and seemed to be pressing against her so that she could not move. She struggled slightly.

The navy-and-yellow pattern danced electrically in her brain. It was the last thing she was conscious of before she dropped down into swirling darkness.

Freya had dithered about racing home to change, uncertain whether her work suit would fit the dress code at the Embassy Room, but when she walked in just before six forty-five, she relaxed. The place was stylish and bang up to date, which meant that absolutely anything went, from jeans and jackets to diamanté-speckled little black frocks and plain linen office suits. There was the same
hum about it that she so much enjoyed in the Metro Café, where she had bumped into Cat Deerbon. Both places gave her a taste of trendy London while being firmly in Lafferton.

The Embassy was not chrome and neon, as she had expected, but pale curved wood and bright pink tweed, attractive and comfortable. It reminded her of a couple of places in Barcelona she and Don had frequented on one of their
weekends there. It was also packed, the young after-work crowd jostling with couples starting on an evening out, plus a few of the older, golf and bridge set. None of them looked out of place, everyone seemed relaxed.

Aidan Sharpe had not arrived. Freya found a corner table for two, with some difficulty, and ordered a non-alcoholic cocktail called a Sunshine Moonshine, which came in a big bowl-shaped
glass, with ice, straws, parasols and strawberries on sticks, and was both intensely fruity and slightly bitter.

She sat back in the curved chair and was suddenly overcome with an intense desire for Simon, to be sitting here with him, laughing, talking, enjoying, taking time before going on somewhere for dinner. It was too long since their last meeting outside the station. He had been wrapped
up in masterminding the drugs op and when he had not been in meetings, was out. Several times Freya had walked past his door and hesitated, wanting to go in for no other reason than to see him, speak to him; several times she had almost picked up the phone to dial his flat number, but had always replaced the receiver. She wanted to ask him out and knew that this was one thing she must not do, that
he was the kind of man who would take it amiss; she desperately wanted to get it right with him. She had waited, held back, stayed silent and so was now about to spend an hour with a prim alternative therapist in his fifties who wore a bow tie.

Whichever direction he had come from she had not seen him, so that he startled her by materialising at her side and, in a gesture that she found unnerving,
kissing her hand.

‘I’m so sorry … my last patient felt faint and I had to take her home. Do you like it here? It’s rather interesting.’

Freya could have applied several adjectives to the Embassy Room bar but ‘interesting’ would not have been
one of them. She took a silent bet that he would order gin and tonic and won.

‘I suppose you’re pretty booked up … acupuncture seems so fashionable.’

‘Oh dear, I hope not. Fashionable today, out of fashion tomorrow.’

‘Like this place.’

‘No, my dear, I rather think the Embassy Room is here to stay and so is my profession.’

His drink arrived. The waitress, who wore bootleg jeans and boots with a white shirt, smiled coolly, before whipping off to an adjacent table. Aidan Sharpe bent down to reach for his glass. As he did so, the cuff of his
jacket shot up. Freya’s stomach clenched. The watch on his wrist was gold, with Roman numerals and a separate midnight-blue dial in one corner showing the phases of the moon.

She realised that she had noticed it subliminally before, on the evening of the Serraillers’ dinner party but had not registered its significance.

She looked up and straight into Aidan Sharpe’s odd, expressionless, intensely
staring eyes.

A couple getting up to leave the adjacent table knocked over a chair which fell against Freya’s, and in the apologies and general fuss, the moment was fractured, but she was in no doubt that he had seen her looking at the watch, and noticed her split second of awareness.

‘This place could be in London,’ Freya said. ‘Lafferton is definitely coming on line.’ She relaxed back and
looked around, apparently at ease, thinking hard. The jeweller had said that phases-of-the-moon watches were hard to find these days – hard but not impossible, and certainly
the one Angela Randall had bought was not unique. Freya had learned through years of experience that coincidence played a larger part in life than almost any other factor and probably that was what she had now – a coincidence.
But she had to allow for the alternative explanation and she had also learned to listen to her instincts, though not always to follow them, and that lesson had stood her in good stead as well. Since the Serraillers’ party, her instincts about Aidan Sharpe had been uneasy ones.

She turned back to him. He was sitting very upright, very still, holding his drink and looking at her, with the expression
of a smile on his mouth but not on his face and certainly not in his eyes. His hands were pale, the fingers long and thin, nails neatly trimmed and oddly bloodless.

‘Why did you come to Lafferton?’ His voice had changed. He sounded amused.

‘Personal reasons … and I’d had enough of London. The Met’s tough and it can be shitty.’

‘You may not find Lafferton a country retreat.’

‘I don’t want one.
And you’re right, it has the usual problems … the young, seething with frustration, petty criminals, drugs. But the whole atmosphere is a relief after London.’