The Suspect

“They think I had something to do with Catherine’s death.”

“How? Why? That’s ridiculous. You were helping them with their investigation.”

Something falls and smashes upstairs. Julianne glances upward and then back to me. “What are they doing in our house?” She is on the verge of tears. “What have you done, Joe?”

I see Charlie’s face peering out of the sitting room. It quickly disappears as Julianne turns. “You stay in that room, young lady,” she barks, sounding more frightened than angry.

The front door is wide open. Anybody walking by can look inside and see what is happening. I can hear cupboards and drawers being opened on the floor above; mattresses are being lifted and beds dragged aside. Julianne doesn’t know what to do. Part of her wants to protect her house from being vandalized, but mostly she wants answers from me. I don’t have any.

The detectives take me through to the kitchen where I find Ruiz peering out of the French doors at the garden. Men with shovels and hoes are ripping up the lawn. D.J. is leaning against Charlie’s swing, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks at me through the smoke, inquisitive, insolent. A faint hint of a smile creases the corners of his mouth— as though he’s watching a Porsche get a parking ticket.

Turning away reluctantly, he lets the cigarette fall into the gravel where it continues to glow. Then he bends and slices open the plastic packing surrounding a radiator.

“We interviewed your neighbors,” explains Ruiz. “You were seen burying something in the garden.”

“A bug-eyed goldfish.”

Ruiz is totally baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

Julianne laughs at the absurdity of it all. We are living in a Monty Python sketch.

“He buried Charlie’s goldfish,” she says. “It’s under the plum tree next to Harold Hamster.”

A couple of the detectives behind us can’t stifle their giggles. Ruiz has a face like thunder. I know I shouldn’t goad him, but it feels good to laugh.

2

The mattress has compressed to the hardness of concrete beneath my hip and shoulder. From the moment I lie down the blood throbs in my ears and my mind begins to race. I want to slip into peaceful emptiness. Instead I chase the dangerous thoughts, magnified in my imagination.

By now Ruiz will have interviewed Julianne. He’ll have asked where I was on the thirteenth of November. She’ll have told him that I spent the night with Jock. She won’t know that’s a lie. She’ll repeat what I told her.

Ruiz will also have talked to Jock, who will tell them that I left his office at five o’clock that day. He asked me out for a drink, but I said no. I said I was going home. None of our stories are going to match.

Julianne has spent all evening in the charge room, hoping to see me. Ruiz told her she could have five minutes, but I can’t face her. I know that’s appalling. I know she must be scared, confused, angry and worried sick. She just wants an explanation. She wants to hear me tell her it’s going to be all right. I’m more frightened of confronting her than I am of Ruiz. How can I explain Elisa? How can I make things right?

Julianne asked me if I thought it unusual that a woman I hadn’t seen in five years is murdered and then the police ask me to help identify her. Glibly, I told her that coincidences were just a couple of things happening simultaneously. Now the coincidences are starting to pile up. What are the chances of Bobby being referred to me as a patient? Or that Catherine would phone my office on the evening she died? When do coincidences stop being coincidences and become a pattern?

I’m not being paranoid. I’m not seeing shadows darting in the corner of my eye or imagining sinister conspiracies. But something is happening here that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

I fall asleep with this thought and sometime during the night I wake suddenly, breathing hard with my heart pounding. I cannot see who or what is chasing me, but I know it’s there, watching, waiting, laughing at me.

Every sound seems exaggerated by the starkness of the cell. I lie awake and listen to the seesaw creaks of bedsprings, water dripping in cisterns, drunks talking in their sleep and guards’ shoes echoing down corridors.

Today is the day. The police will either charge me or let me go. I should be more anxious and concerned. Mostly I feel remote and separate from what’s happening. I pace out the cell, thinking how bizarre life can be. Look at all the twists and turns, the coincidences and bad luck, the mistakes and misunderstandings. I don’t feel angry or bitter. I have faith in the system. Pretty soon they’re going to realize the evidence isn’t strong enough against me. They’ll have to let me go.

This sort of optimism strikes me as quite odd when I think about how naturally cynical I am concerning law and order. Innocent people get shafted every day. I’ve seen the evidence. It’s incontrovertible. Yet I have no fears about this happening to me.

I blame my mother and her unwavering belief in authority figures such as policemen, judges and politicians. She grew up in a village in the Cotswolds, where the town constable rode a bicycle, knew every local by name and solved most crimes within half an hour. He epitomized fairness and honesty.

Since then, despite the regular stories of police planting evidence, taking bribes and falsifying statements, my mother has never altered her beliefs. “God made more good people than bad,” she says, as though a head count will sort everything out. And when this seems highly unlikely, she adds, “They will get their comeuppance in Heaven.”

A hatch opens in the lower half of the door and a wooden tray is propelled across the floor. I have a plastic bottle of orange juice, some gray-looking sludge that I assume to be scrambled eggs and two slices of bread that have been waved over a toaster. I put it to one side and wait for Simon to arrive.

He looks very jolly in his silk tie printed with holly and silver bells. It’s the sort of tie Charlie will give me for Christmas. I wonder if Simon has ever been married or had children.

He can’t stay long; he’s due in court. I see strands of his horsehair wig sticking out of his briefcase. The police have requested a blood and hair sample, he says. I have no problem with that. They are also seeking permission to interview my patients, but a judge has refused them access to my files. Good for him.

The biggest piece of news concerns two of the phone calls Catherine made to my office. Meena, bless her cotton socks, has told detectives that she talked to Catherine twice in early November.

I had totally forgotten about the search for a new secretary. Meena had placed an advertisement in the Medical Appointments section of The Guardian. It asked for experienced medical secretaries, or applicants with nursing training. We had more than eighty replies.

I start explaining this to Simon, getting more and more excited. “Meena was coming up with a short list of twelve.”

“Catherine made the short list.”

“Yes. Maybe. She must have done. That would explain the call. Meena will know.” Did Catherine know she was applying to be my secretary? Meena must have mentioned my name. Maybe Catherine wanted to surprise me. Or perhaps she thought I wouldn’t give her an interview.

Simon scissors his fingers across his tie, as if pretending to cut it off. “Why would a woman who accused you of sexual assault apply to become your secretary?” He sounds like a prosecutor.

“I didn’t assault her.”

“And why would she write a love letter to you?”

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t comment. Instead he looks at his watch and closes his briefcase. “I don’t think you should answer any more police questions.”

“Why?”

“You’re digging yourself into a deeper hole.”

Simon shrugs on his overcoat and leans down to brush a smudge of dirt from the mirror like surface of his black shoes. “They have eight more hours. Unless they come up with something new, you’ll be home by this evening.”

Lying on the bunk with my hands behind my head, I stare at the ceiling. Someone has scrawled in the corner: