The Various Haunts of Men (6 page)

To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me
.

Freya weighed the package in her hand. It was not heavy, did not smell or rattle.

Was Angela Randall the ‘You’ or the ‘Me’?

She went downstairs
and let herself out of the front door as the DC was coming up the path.

‘Any joy?’

‘Not much. Neighbours that were in said she was always pleasant, kept herself to herself, no visitors they could think of … only thing was, the lady on the corner, Mrs Savage, said in the last six months or so, Angela Randall had taken up running.’

‘Yes, there are tracksuits in the wardrobe and a pair of brand
new very expensive running shoes … proper gear.’

‘She went out of the house every morning at the same time, regardless of whether she had just come in from night duty or just got up.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘Up on the Hill usually, except when it was very wet, and then she went down the road.’

‘And when did Mrs Savage last see her?’

‘She is pretty sure on the morning after Mrs Ashton reported
her as last having been to work … Mrs Savage hasn’t seen her, or any sign of anyone at the house, since then. She thought she’d gone away.’

‘Did she see her come back from her run that morning?’

‘Doesn’t remember, but says she didn’t always … Mrs Savage goes out three mornings a week to catch an early bus to her daughter’s or to go to the Tuesday market … so Randall may have come back without
being noticed.’

‘Or not. Anything else?’

‘Nope.’

‘OK, let’s get back. I’ve got a present to open.’

An hour later, the golden gift stood on Freya Graffham’s desk, shining like a prop for one of the three kings in a nativity play.

She had come in and checked the latest reports. Angela Randall’s details were logged on to the missing persons database and her description had been circulated to
hospitals.

One of the things Freya had been looking for at the house had been any relatively recent photograph, which could eventually be put up on the County Police Force’s official website. There had been none and neither was there any news.

‘And no body,’ the DI said, stopping by her workstation.

‘There will be.’

‘You’ve got a feeling?’

‘She seems to have had a lonely enough life … if
I lived in a sterile box like that and apparently hadn’t a friend or a loved one in the world, I’d jump in the cut.’

‘From which she’d have been dragged days ago.’

Freya pulled the parcel towards her again.

To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me
.

‘I’ll leave you to open it then.’

Freya hesitated. Going into Angela Randall’s house, even searching through her drawers and cupboards,
had seemed a job; she had not felt like an intruder simply because there had been nothing private or personal to make her feel that she was prying. Searching for a contact name and address, or some clue as to where the missing woman might have gone, was routine. But opening this ostentatiously wrapped parcel felt like an invasion of privacy, and something Randall would have minded very much.

Freya still hesitated, smoothing her thumb over the mirrored paper, and then took a paper knife to the neatly taped edges. The gold paper sprang open, revealing a
gold box. Inside it, among crisp tissue and deep in a nest of blue velvet, was a pair of gold cufflinks, set with deep blue lapis lazuli.

Not
for
Angela Randall then, but
from
her, ‘To You,’ an unnamed man, ‘with all possible love’.

Freya looked at the cufflinks, and at the box, the silk-lined lid, the tissue … an intimate secret exposed on her desk. A sad secret, too, an extravagant gift from a lonely woman in late-middle age … to whom? Not a relative. A lover? Obviously. Yet, if so, why had there been no other indication of a man in Angela Randall’s life?

She went to fetch coffee from the machine. Without any clue as to
the woman’s whereabouts or movements, with no reported sighting, no suicide note and no body, she knew perfectly well she could not justify spending any more time on the case … she had probably spent too much on it already. Angela Randall had disappeared, and until she turned up again in some form, she was merely the number she had had assigned to her … Missing Person BH140076/CT.

The last week before Christmas and a clear, cold night, so that at dawn, the slopes of the Hill are thinly iced with frost and the Wern Stones gleam with rime like snail trails over their backs. The ground is too slippery at this hour, the runners are not out, but the mountain bikers strain up the slope, their breath pluming up white in the crackling air.

The woman with the Dobermanns is
not on the Hill yet but Jim Williams with the Yorkshire terrier is out because he can’t sleep. For the past week or two he has come here earlier and earlier, sometimes long before dawn, both of them bundled up into warm coats. Jim had promised his sister that he would take care of Skippy, though he knows he will never love the dog, whose breath smells fetid and who snaps at him when he puts on the
lead. But Phyl could not have died comfortably unless she had been sure Skippy would not be sent to strangers or be put down.

This morning the mountain bikers whisk by, heads down. With no runners to chase and no other dogs out
yet, Skippy can be let off the lead, though Phyl would never have done such a thing. She’d petted the dog too much, kept him under her eye more like a child than an animal;
but that was what had made her happy.

Now, Jim Williams watches the little dog break into a quick trot, heading towards the undergrowth, and then on into the trees. It seems to him Skippy has a better life now, freer, enjoying what an animal should.

The wind is sharp as a blade on his face up here on the Hill, but as the dawn comes up, the view of Lafferton, the dark line of the river and the
cathedral rising out of the frosty air, is worth the climb and the cold. Now, from somewhere on one of the paths below, Jim Williams hears the barking of the Dobermanns.

‘Skippy … Skippy …’ He hears his own voice ringing round in the bitter air, and his whistle that sets the Dobermanns off again. ‘Here, boy … Skippy …’

But there is no sound from the little terrier and no sign of him, there are
only the yelping Dobermanns coming nearer, up the slope, and the faint rumble of a vehicle going away down the road.

Cat Deerbon stood at the window of her consulting room, looking out through the slats of the blind to the surgery car park. Rain streamed down the glass. It was almost nine o’clock and still not fully light.

Monday morning – a full list of appointments, two drugs reps, calls, an afternoon antenatal clinic, and Hannah to be taken to the dentist after school … and she had hardly made a dent
on the preparations for Christmas. But none of this troubled her very much, set beside the fact that Karin McCafferty had an appointment.

Cat let the blind slats drop back together sharply. I can’t do it, she thought – and it was a feeling so rare that it alone worried her.

Karin McCafferty was forty-four, a patient who had become a friend when Cat’s mother, Dr Meriel Serrailler, had engaged
her to redesign the garden at Hallam House.

Cat saw her now – tall, with red hair that sprang from her head, a long, oval, creamy-skinned face. She had a face that was plain, in an oddly memorable way. Karin had given up a high-powered career in banking to
become a garden designer and plantswoman, a change that had transformed her, she said. Her new career had blossomed along with her hardy plants.
An upmarket garden magazine had recently featured her work and one of her gardens had been shown on television.

Karin – great company, interested in a multitude of things as well as gardens. She and Mike McCafferty – a dull man Cat thought – had been married for twenty-two years. No children. ‘We went down every route and side route but no go; IVF had a much lower success rate then and I always
knew that it was my known children I wanted – I couldn’t have adopted.’

Sam Deerbon adored Karin, though Hannah was wary of her. ‘She’s bossy.’

‘Too right I am,’ Karin had said when told.

Karin McCafferty. The X-rays and report from the oncologist at Bevham General were on Cat’s desk.

‘You shouldn’t let patients become friends,’ Chris had said the previous evening. Perhaps he was right, but
detachment was not something Cat had ever been good at. She took the problems and pain of her patients to heart, and the joys as well, and she would not like to be any different. But then came the hard confrontations, as this one with Karin was going to be.

Her desk telephone rang. ‘It’s nearly quarter past.’ Jean in reception.

‘Sorry, sorry … wheel them in.’

She pushed Karin’s results to one
side. Before that, fourteen other people needed her full attention. She turned to smile at the first of them, coming through the door.

Iris Chater had aged since her husband’s death. But Cat knew, watching her walk disconsolately into the room,
that the process was reversible. At the moment, the shock and stress of bereavement, the tears, lack of sleep and unaccustomed loneliness had crumpled
her, drained her of all vitality. But she was not too old for time and rest to heal and restore her. Now, she sighed as she sat down. Her eyes had the flat, inwardly focused look of the recently bereaved.

‘How are you coping?’

‘I’m managing, Doctor, I’m not too bad. And I know Harry is best off now. I do know that.’ Her sad eyes filled with tears.

‘It’s hard. Of course it’s hard.’ Cat pushed
the box of tissues across her desk.

‘I keep hearing him in the night … I wake up and I can still hear him breathing. I feel him with me in the room. I suppose that sounds daft to you.’

‘No, it sounds normal. I’d be worried if you said it wasn’t happening.’

‘I’m not going mad then?’

‘Definitely not.’

The question they never failed either to ask, or to leave in the air unspoken between them
for the doctor to pick up. Iris Chater relaxed, and her face took on a little more colour.

‘Apart from missing Harry, how’s your own health?’

‘I’m just tired really. I can’t eat much either. It comes and goes.’ She shifted about in her chair, picked her bag up from the floor and put it down again. Cat waited.

‘Harry lost his appetite.’

‘I know. He lost it because he had cancer, and he’d had
a long struggle. You’ve lost yours because you’ve been bereaved. Don’t worry about it at all. You say it comes and goes, so just eat when it’s there. Eat what you
fancy … Your appetite will get back to normal when it’s ready.’

‘I see.’

‘Are you worried about being in the house on your own at night?’

‘Oh no, Dr Deerbon. He’s there with me, you see … Harry’s always there.’

Like many of Cat’s
older patients, Iris Chater was not ill, she needed reassurance and a listening ear. Nevertheless, Cat sensed that she was holding something back, in spite of her gentle probing. She waited a moment, but nothing came.

‘Well, pop in and see me again in a month. I want to know how you’re getting on and in the meantime, if there’s anything at all …’

Iris Chater made a business of getting up, gathering
herself, going towards the door, then, at the very last moment, she turned.

‘There is something, isn’t there?’ Cat said gently.

The tears filled the woman’s eyes again.

‘If I could just know, Doctor. If I could just be sure that he’s all right. Is there any way I can be sure?’

‘Aren’t you sure? In your own heart? Come on … Harry was a good man.’

‘He was, wasn’t he? He really was.’

Still
she did not go.

‘I wondered …’

She glanced at Cat, then quickly away. What is it, Cat puzzled, what is it she wants to ask me, to get reassurance about?

‘I get this funny breathing.’

There was nothing wrong with Iris Chater. She was afraid … afraid of dying as her husband had died, and
vulnerable after his death. Cat examined her briefly. She had no symptoms, had had no chest pains or breathlessness
and her lungs were clear.

‘I don’t want to prescribe you sleeping tablets or tranquillisers. I don’t honestly think you need them.’

‘Oh no, I wouldn’t want anything like that, Doctor.’

‘But you do need to relax.’

‘It’s just what I can’t do, you see.’

‘Have you ever listened to one of those relaxation tapes … soothing music, and exercises to do to calm your breathing?’

‘Like in those Eastern
religions?’

‘No, these are much more straightforward – just aids to relaxing. I’m afraid I can’t prescribe them but they sell them at the health shops. They’re not expensive. Why don’t you go and have a browse … ask them if there are any they recommend? If you buy one of those and try using it to help you relax every day even just for quarter of an hour, I think you’ll find it will really help.
But you’ve lost your husband of fifty years, Mrs Chater. What you’re going through is normal. You’re not going to feel yourself again for a while yet, you know.’

The rest of the surgery took its course through sore throats and period pains to children’s ear infections and arthritic joints.

At twenty to twelve, Jean brought in a mug of coffee.

‘There’s just Mrs McCafferty.’

For the past busy
couple of hours, Cat had been able to put it to the back of her mind.

‘Give me a couple of minutes.’

Jean smiled sympathetically as she went out.

How often, Cat wondered half an hour later, have I been helped through a difficult consultation by the patient? Been comforted myself by people who have just been told that their illness is terminal? Even had to tell parents that their child is
going to die, only to be reassured by them that they were certain she, the doctor, had done everything she could and that they knew she was as upset as they were.

And now, Karin McCafferty had been calm, controlled – and sympathetic. ‘It’s rotten for you as well … probably worse with a patient you know as well as you know me.’ Those had been her first words, as she had given Cat a hug. ‘But I’m
OK … and I liked Dr Monk very much.’