The Suspect

wall of other people’s marriages.

Jock and I go a lot further back than university. The same obstetrician, in the same hospital, delivered us both on the same day, only eight minutes apart. That was on the eighteenth of August 1960, at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in Hammersmith. Our mothers shared a delivery suite and the OB had to dash back and forth between the curtains.

I arrived first. Jock had such a big head that he got stuck and they had to pull him out with forceps. Occasionally he still jokes about coming second and trying to catch up. In reality, competition is never a joke with him. We were probably side by side in the nursery. We might have looked at each other, or kept each other awake.

It says something about the separateness of individual experience that we began our lives only minutes apart but didn’t meet again until nineteen years later. Julianne says fate brought us together. Maybe she’s right. Aside from being held upside down and smacked on the ass by the same doctor, we had very little in common.

I can’t explain why Jock and I became friends. What did I offer to the partnership? He was a big wheel on campus, always invited to the best parties and flirting with the prettiest girls. My dividend was obvious, but what did he get? Maybe that’s what they mean when they say people just “click.”

We long ago drifted apart politically and sometimes morally, but we can’t shake loose our history. He was best man at my wedding and I was best man at both of his. We have keys for each other’s houses and copies of each other’s wills. Shared experience is a powerful bond, but it’s not just that.

Jock, for all his right-wing bluster is actually a big softie, who has donated more money to charity than he settled on either of his ex-wives. Every year he organizes a fund-raiser for Great Ormond Street and he hasn’t missed a London Marathon in fifteen years. Last year he pushed a hospital bed with a load of “naughty” nurses in stockings and suspenders. He looked more like Benny Hill than Dr. Kildare.

Jock emerges from the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He pads barefoot across the living room to the kitchen. I hear the fridge door open and then close. He slices oranges and fires up an industrial-size juicer. The kitchen is full of gadgets. He has a machine to grind coffee, another to sift it and a third, which looks like a cannon shell rather than a percolator, to brew it. He can make waffles, muffins, pancakes or cook eggs in a dozen different ways.

I take my turn in the bathroom. The mirror is steamed up. I rub it with the corner of a towel, making a rough circle large enough to see my face. I look exhausted. Wednesday night’s TV highlights are printed backward on my right cheek. I scrub my face with a wet washcloth.

There are more gadgets on the windowsill, including a battery-powered nasal-hair trimmer that sounds like a demented bee stuck in a bottle. There are a dozen different brands of shampoo. It reminds me of home. I always tease Julianne about her “lotions and potions” filling every available inch of our en suite. Somewhere in the midst of these cosmetics I have a disposable razor, a can of shaving foam and a deodorant stick. Unfortunately, retrieving them means risking a domino effect that will topple every bottle in the bathroom.

Jock hands me a glass of orange juice and we sit in silence staring at the percolator.

“I could call her for you,” he suggests.

I shake my head.

“I could tell her how you’re moping around the place… no good to anyone… lost… desolate…”

“It wouldn’t make any difference.”

He asks about the argument. He wants to know what upset her. Was it the arrest, the headlines or the fact that I lied to her?

“The lying.”

“I figured as much.”

He keeps pressing me for details. I don’t really want to go there, but the story comes out as my coffee grows cold. Perhaps Jock can help me make sense of it all.

When I reach the part about seeing Catherine’s body in the morgue, I suddenly realize that he might have known her. He knew a lot more of the nurses at the Marsden than I did.

“Yeah, I was thinking that,” he says, “but the photograph they put in the paper didn’t ring any bells. The police wanted to know if you stayed with me on the night she died,” he adds.

“Sorry about that.”

“Where were you?”

I shrug.

“It’s true then. You’ve been having a bit on the side.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It never is, old son.”

Jock goes into his schoolboy routine, wanting to know all the “sordid details.” I won’t play along, which makes him grumpy.

“So why couldn’t you tell the police where you were?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Frustration passes quickly across his face. He doesn’t push any further. Instead he changes tack and admonishes me for not talking to him sooner. If I wanted him to provide me with an alibi, I should have at least told him.

“What if Julianne had asked me? I might have given the game away. And I could have told the police you were with me, instead of dropping you in the shit.”

“You told the truth.”

“I would have lied for you.”

“What if I had killed her?”

“I still would have lied for you. You’d do the same for me.”

I shake my head. “I wouldn’t lie for you if I thought you’d killed someone.”

His eyes meet mine and stay there. Then he laughs and shrugs. “We’ll never know.”

5

At the office I cross the lobby aware that the security guards and receptionist are staring at me. I take the lift upstairs to find Meena at her desk and an empty waiting room.

“Where is everyone?”

“They canceled.”

“Everyone?”

I lean over her desk and look down the appointments list for the day. All the names are crossed out with a red line. Except for Bobby Moran.

Meena is still talking. “Mr. Lilley’s mother died. Hannah Barrymore has the flu. Zoe has to mind her sister’s children…” I know she’s trying to make me feel better.

I point to Bobby’s name and tell her to cross it out.

“He hasn’t called.”

“Trust me.”

Despite Meena’s best efforts to clean up, my office is still a mess. Evidence of the police search is everywhere, including the fine graphite powder they used to dust for fingerprints.

“They didn’t take any of your files, but some of them were mixed up.”

I tell her not to worry. The notes cease to be important if I no longer have any patients. She stands at the door, trying to think of something positive to say. “Did I get you into trouble?”

“What do you mean?”

“The girl who applied for the job… the one who was murdered… should I have handled it differently?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Did you know her?”

“Yes.”