It was midnight for Alba, midnight for me. The doctors spoke of cause. Acute viral encephalitis. But I could see only effect. My bright, beautiful, laughing, loving baby was now an unresponsive bundle of emptiness. I looked into those dull eyes and told myself my Alba was in there somewhere. But she was already far beyond my feeble outreach.
She still had all of my love but it wasn’t enough, and I felt it was my fault it wasn’t enough.
In the end they told me she was gone beyond all hope of recovery. Only the machines kept her breathing. They needed my say-so to switch them off.
It was like they were saying, you’ve already managed to lose your child, now we want you to kill her.
So I did. Goodnight-Day!
The tape hadn’t finished-Pascoe could hear the woman’s breathing, short and harsh at first then modulating into a softer, longer rhythm, as if she were pausing to get herself under control.
He needed a pause too. He switched the machine off and sat staring sightlessly out of the window.
A lost child. A lost daughter. He had been very close to that. And in this, being very close meant going all the way and beyond, as no matter what others told you of hope and urged on you of strength, you were already over the threshold and into the grey land of loss, of grief, of living death. He recalled his feelings on being dragged back from that land. Oh there was joy, and gratitude, and happiness almost painful in its intensity. But before that there’d been what later analysis made him think of as a Lazarus moment, compounded of bewilderment, and resentment almost, at being returned to a state where crossing that dreadful threshold still remained a possibility.
This woman had been over that threshold. And hadn’t returned.
He shook his head and forced his gaze to focus on the reality of the handsome Spanish-style house.
Casa Alba.
Oh shit.
Casa Alba. Meaning, if his small Spanish served him, the house of dawn.
Alba Dickenson. Named after the dawn. Whose death sent her mother leaping over the intervening day into midnight.
Could it be simple coincidence that Pal had built his house in the same village where his stepmother lived and given it a name that must remind her every time she heard it of her dead child? Could he have been capable of such a piece of cruel mockery?
And in relation to his own death, did it matter anyway?
He was drawn out of this painful speculation by the sound of a car engine being driven very fast. He twisted in his seat to look towards the narrow country road, along which a bright red sports car was hurtling as if driven by one of the Schumachers with the other in hot pursuit.
A red Alfa Romeo Spider. Hadn’t Sue-Lynn been driving such a car the other night at Moscow?
The question was answered as, with a screeching of brakes of the kind which is usually followed by a very loud crash, the Spider span off the road and through the gateway with no more than the merest clipping of a wing mirror.
It was a fine or fortunate piece of driving but it looked like it might all go to waste as the car came screaming up the drive as if its driver’s intention were to enter the house without bothering to knock. He could see Sue-Lynn’s face through the windscreen, so devoid of emotion it might as well have been a mask, and just when he was convinced that in an unlikely act of suttee she had decided to follow her husband at speed into the next world, she hit the brake.
In a second manoeuvre worthy of a stunt artist, the car skidded to a halt, its back end slewing round and sending a machine-gun spatter of gravel against the bonnet of the BMW.
Sue-Lynn didn’t even glance towards the other two vehicles as she slid out and headed up to her front door, almost as fleet of foot as she was of machine.
And the woman in the BMW was no slouch either, observed Pascoe. She was out and heading towards Sue-Lynn, shouting something as she ran. He couldn’t make out the words but the tone was unmistakably hostile. He began to get out of his car.
Sue-Lynn turned and looked at the approaching woman, decided she didn’t like what she saw or heard, and continued inserting her key in the lock, presumably with a view to putting the front door between herself and her visitor.
It would have been a wise move. The well-built woman was alongside her now, still yelling incoherently and thrusting a sheet of paper in her face.
Sue-Lynn looked at it and spoke.
Whatever she said didn’t go down too well. The other woman said, “Bitch!” Pascoe was close enough now to make this out quite clearly, but not yet close enough nor indeed psychologically prepared enough to intervene when she drew back her right hand and launched a blow at Sue-Lynn’s head. No open-handed feminine slap, this, but a full-blooded feminist right hook that landed with audible ferocity on the side of Sue-Lynn’s jaw.
She crashed back against the door and slid down it with an expression that seemed to have as much of surprise as pain in it. Her attacker loomed over her for a moment as if contemplating giving her a kicking, then ripped in half the paper she’d been waving in her left hand and scattered the halves over the recumbent woman.
Pascoe said, “OK, that’s enough.”
She turned, glared at him and said, “You think so?” then shouldered him aside and headed back to the BMW.
He knew he ought to arrest her. Senior policemen couldn’t be witnesses to assault without doing something. On the other hand with a punch like that…
Too late now anyway. The BMW’s engine roared, its rear wheels span in the gravel and it was his car’s turn to get the fusillade, then it found traction and set off down the drive as if bent on breaking the Spider’s recently established record.
Sue-Lynn was trying to stand. He said, “Are you all right?” and offered his hand. She ignored it and pulled herself up by the door handle.
He said, “Mrs Maciver, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe. We met at Moscow House.”
She turned the key in the lock and opened the door just sufficiently to slip inside.
He said, “I’m sorry to trouble you so soon after your sad loss, but I wonder if we could talk…”
She said with some difficulty-her jaw visibly swelling-“My sad loss? You mean my house and my income? That’s the only fucking sad loss I’ve had. But the bastard’s not going to get away with it, believe me! So why don’t you just piss off?”
She slammed the door in his face.
What’s happened to the old Pascoe charm? he asked himself.
He turned away, then paused and bent down to pick up the two pieces of what appeared to be a computer-generated photograph printed on ordinary bond paper.
He joined them up.
It was a picture of a ruffled bed with on one side of it a woman in her panties wrestling with her bra, and on the other a man apparently having a problem zipping up his trousers over a semi-erect penis, both staring pop- eyed into the camera as if it were (and indeed as in the circumstances presumably it was) the last thing on earth they wanted to see.
The woman was Sue-Lynn, the man was Dr Tom Lockridge.
And it didn’t take more than a small proportion of Pascoe’s detective skills to guess that it was probably Mrs Tom Lockridge speeding away in the Beamer.
There was a date and time registered along the bottom of the photo.
The same night as, and not very long before, Pal Maciver’s suicide.
He returned to his car and sat down to review the situation.
So far, he concluded, all he’d got was a mixture of doubts and whispers, sound and fury, none of it signifying enough to make a coherent report.
