me.
The towpath is deserted and the nearby buildings are dark and empty. It feels a lot later than it is— like the early hours of the morning, when the world always seems much lonelier and beds much warmer.
Ruiz is walking ahead of me with his hands buried in his coat pockets and his head down. He seems full of pent-up rage. After about five hundred yards the railway tracks appear to our right. Maintenance sheds are silhouetted against the residual light. Rolling stock sits idle in a freight yard.
With barely any warning a train roars past. The sound bounces off the tin sheds and the brick walls of the canal, until it seems as though we’re standing in a tunnel.
Ruiz has stopped suddenly on the path. I almost run into him.
“Recognize anything?”
I know exactly where we are. Instead of feeling horror or sadness, my only emotion is anger. It’s late; I’m cold; and more than anything else I’m tired of Ruiz’s snide glances and raised eyebrows. If he has something to say, get it over with and let me go home.
Ruiz raises his arm and for a moment I think he’s going to strike me.
“Look over there. Follow the edge of the building down.”
I trace the path of his outstretched hand and see the wall. A darker strip in the foreground must be the ditch where they found her body. Looking over his left shoulder, I see the silhouettes of the trees and the headstones of Kensal Green Cemetery.
“Why am I here?” I ask, feeling empty inside.
“Use you’re imagination— you’re good at that.”
He’s angry and for some reason I’m to blame. I don’t often meet someone with his intensity— apart from obsessive-compulsives. I used to know guys like him at school; kids who were so ferociously determined to prove they were tough that they never stopped fighting. They had too much to prove and not enough time to prove it.
“Why am I here?” I ask again.
“Because I have some questions for you.” He doesn’t look at me. “And I want to tell you some things about Bobby Moran…”
“I can’t talk about my patients.”
“You just have to listen.” He rocks from foot to foot. “Take my word for it— you’ll find it fascinating.” He walks two paces toward the canal and spits into the water. “Bobby Moran has no girlfriend or fiancee called Arky. He lives in a boarding house in north London, with a bunch of asylum seekers waiting for council housing. He’s unemployed and hasn’t worked for nearly two years. There is no such company as Nevaspring— not a registered one at any rate.
“His father was never in the air force— as a mechanic, a pilot, or anything else. Bobby grew up in Liverpool, not London. Since leaving school he’s had part-time jobs and for a while worked as a volunteer at a sheltered workshop in Lancashire. We found no history of psychiatric illness or hospitalization.”
Ruiz is pacing back and forth as he talks. His breath condenses in the air and trails after him like he’s a steam engine. “A lot of people had nice things to say about Bobby. He is very neat and tidy according to his landlady. She does his washing and doesn’t remember smelling chloroform on any of his clothes. His old bosses at the shelter called him a ‘big softie.’
“That’s what I find really strange, Professor. Nothing you said about him is true. I can understand you getting one or two details wrong. We all make mistakes. But it’s as though we’re talking about a completely different person.”
My voice is hoarse. “It can’t be him.”
“That’s what I thought. So I checked. Big guy, six foot two, overweight, John Lennon glasses— that’s our boy. Then I wondered why he’d tell all these lies to a shrink who was trying to help him. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“He’s hiding something.”
“Maybe. But he didn’t kill Catherine McBride.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“A dozen people at an evening class can verify his whereabouts on the night she disappeared.”
I don’t have any strength left in my legs.
“Sometimes I’m pretty slow on the uptake, Prof. My old mum used to say that I was born a day late and never caught up. Truth is, I normally get there in the end. It just takes me a little longer than clever people.” He says it with bitterness rather than triumph.
“You see, I asked myself why Bobby Moran would make up all these lies. And then I thought, what if he didn’t? What if
“You can’t be serious.”
“How did you know that Catherine McBride cut her carotid artery to hasten her death? It wasn’t mentioned in the postmortem.”
“I studied to be a doctor.”
“What about the chloroform?”
“I told you.”
“Yes, you did. I did some reading. Do you know that it takes a few drops of chloroform on a mask or a cloth to render a person unconscious? You have to know what you’re doing when you play around with that stuff. A few drops too many and the victim’s breathing is shut off. They suffocate.”
“The killer most likely had some medical knowledge.”
“I came up with that too.” Ruiz stamps his shoes on the bitumen, trying to stay warm. A stray cat, wandering along inside the wire fence, suddenly flattens itself at the sound of our voices. Both of us wait and watch, but the cat is in no hurry to move on.
“How did you know she was a nurse?” says Ruiz.
“She had the medallion.”
“I think you recognized her straightaway. I think all the rest was a pretense.”
“No.”
His tone is colder. “You also knew her grandfather— Justice McBride.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“It didn’t think it was important. It was years ago. Psychologists often give evidence in the family division. We do evaluations on children and parents. We make recommendations to the court.”
“What did you make of him?”
“He had his faults, but he was an honest judge. I respected him.”
Ruiz is trying hard to be cordial, but polite restraint doesn’t come naturally to him.
“Do you know what I find really hard to explain?” he says. “Why it took you so long to tell me about knowing Catherine McBride and her grandfather, yet you give me a crock of shit about somebody called Bobby Moran. No, sorry that isn’t right— you
He grins at me— all white teeth and dark eyes.
“Shall I tell you what I’ve been doing these last two weeks? I’ve been searching this canal. We brought in dredging equipment and emptied the locks. It was a lousy job. There was three feet of putrid sludge and slime. We found stolen bicycles, shopping carts, car chassis, hubcaps, two washing machines, car tires, condoms and more than four thousand used syringes… Do you know what else we found?”
I shake my head.
“Catherine McBride’s handbag and her mobile phone. It took us a while to dry everything out. Then we had to check the phone records. That’s when we discovered that the very last call she made was to your office. At 6:37 p.m. on Wednesday, November thirteenth. She was calling from a pub not far from here. Whoever had arranged to meet her hadn’t turned up. My guess is that she called to find out why.”
“How can you be sure?”
Ruiz smiles. “We also found her diary. It had been in the water for so long the pages were stuck together and
