Dying for Christmas (29 page)

* * *

I have collected all the pillows and built myself a nest in our double bed in which I am cocooned against the discoloured patch on the ceiling where the water tank once leaked and the broken plastic blind cord that flaps uselessly against the window.

Somehow it feels safer here to think about all the stuff that happened. Sonia Rubenstein is always trying to get me to take responsibility for my own actions. ‘Own your shit,’ she tells me, so from the security of my nest I force myself to think back to what happened after my meeting with Natalie, when there was still time to stop.

It was easy enough to come up with an excuse to tell Travis why I needed to be away for a couple of days. I told him I was going on a team-bonding weekend with work. Two days in a hotel in Norfolk.

The initial stages of Natalie’s plan went fairly smoothly. It wasn’t hard to make it look like she had left the clinic under duress. I phoned her at an agreed time when she was having lunch with a couple of other ‘guests’. Later, they would describe in great, overblown detail how she shook as she spoke to her husband, before reluctantly agreeing to meet him outside the clinic gates as long as he promised to leave her alone after that. She didn’t take her phone or her bank cards or her passport or her clothes. She had no intention of going anywhere, they insisted.

She must have put on a bloody good act. The papers later reported that the two women, who declined to give their names or details of the procedures they’d undergone, told police they’d begged her not to meet him.

I was waiting for her in the hire car as planned. When we drove off up the M1 there was a moment where we felt euphoric, like we were in some kind of feel-good female-bonding road movie. We put on Radio 2 and danced in our seats. But by the time we arrived in Scotland, the novelty had worn off and we were both anxious and crotchety. Natalie accused me of driving like an old woman, and I said, ‘Well you’d know all about that,’ which I knew would get to her. She’s only seven years older than me, but she’s one of those women who really mind about that sort of thing. We were both relieved when, after a fretful night, I got in the car again and came home.

Incredibly, the plan worked. Natalie had disappeared off the face of the earth and every finger pointed at Dominic. The papers were full of it for a while:
Search Intensifies for Missing Stylist
. The story had everything – jealous husband, gorgeous woman, a history of extra-marital affairs, boob job. It even made the television news on one occasion. Travis and I were watching together and I jolted so violently, I made him jolt too. I think he was embarrassed, because neither of us mentioned my odd reaction.

For a couple of weeks following our road trip to Scotland, I heard nothing from Natalie or Dominic and was starting to believe it was all really over. Lying on the sofa in our Wood Green flat I stroke one of the bald patches where the hair has started to grow through, soft like suede. (I’m lucky, apparently, some people never regain their hair.) It’s a new habit I’ve developed and it drives Travis mad. ‘You’re just going to rub all the new hair away,’ he said yesterday. ‘Do you want to end up bald?’

Sometime in September, one of the papers ran a story on a jeweller in Edinburgh who’d come forward with CCTV footage of a woman trying to sell a diamond necklace that had been reported stolen. It turned out Dominic Lacey was the person who’d reported it stolen, at the same time he learned his wife was missing from the clinic. The woman in the film was wearing a baseball cap and glasses and the footage was grainy, but there was enough of a resemblance to Natalie Lacey to plant a seed of doubt. In the absence of a body or any evidence of foul play, Dominic Lacey was off the hook.

By the time I read through to the end of the news story, I could hardly make out the words through the red mist that had descended over my eyes. I knew immediately, and beyond any doubt, that it was Natalie. I should have known it wouldn’t be enough for her to get away from her abusive husband. She had to steal from him as well. Natalie’s greed had wrecked everything.

I was back to square one.

* * *

Kim tells herself she is just doing her job. She is still Family Liaison for the Golds, and that extends to Travis Riley. So what could be more natural than to be sitting in a coffee shop round the corner from the hospital where he works, sipping from a cappuccino cup as large as a goldfish bowl and observing the look of total incomprehension on the young medic’s face.

‘What photograph?’

Kim likes Travis. Or at least she thinks she does, though she still can’t quite shake off the niggling feeling that he has secrets. But now his pale eyes are looking at her blankly through those black-rimmed glasses and he is leaning forward and twiddling a piece of hair around a long, elegant finger. And she knows she is about to tell him something he won’t want to hear. When she explains about the pornographic Facebook photo, she says Jessica’s family believes it to have been photoshopped. She doesn’t say that she knows this to be false, but leaves Travis to decide for himself.

‘They think it’s a work colleague with a grudge,’ she says.

Travis makes all those gestures people make when they’re miming disbelief, knitting his brows together and turning down the corners of his mouth while moving his head back slightly and his shoulders up.

‘I don’t understand. Jessica gets on well with the people at work. She even went on a team-building weekend with them in the summer.’

It’s the first Kim has heard of the team-building weekend. She stores the information away.

‘And how is Jessica coping?’

She spoke to her only recently but she wants to hear it from Travis. She is curious about these two. There is affection there, but she doesn’t sense much passion.

Travis shrugs. His shoulders are narrow, even in the hooded sweatshirt he is wearing over a grey T-shirt.

‘She’s been through a lot,’ he says. ‘She’s bound to be a bit … weird.’

‘More weird than usual,’ Kim says, smiling to show it’s a joke.

He has a way of laughing that sounds more like a sigh, softening out into thin air. ‘You know, she seems to be getting more stressed rather than less. More scared. That’s what I mean. Obviously not knowing if she’ll be charged, and what with, is getting to her. And it doesn’t help that Lacey has regained consciousness. She’s now convinced herself he’ll insist it was all consensual. She thinks she’ll have to face him in court and go through all the grubby details of what he did to her. She thinks he’ll get off on that. It’s what men like Lacey do.’

Kim doesn’t demur. It’s what men like Lacey do – they violate their victim over and over again. First with the original assault, then in court and then again in prison. Sex offenders exchange copies of their own official court papers like pornography.

‘And how are you coping, Travis? It must be tough knowing the man responsible for Jessica’s ordeal is just a few hundred feet away, on another ward.’

Superintendent Robertson had studied the layout of the hospital and spoken to Travis’ supervisor and been assured there was no chance of him accidentally coming into contact with Lacey. Also, Lacey was being held under guard.

Travis shrugs. ‘Just knowing he exists is bad enough – it doesn’t make any difference whether he’s five minutes away or five hours.’

On her way back to Heather’s flat, Kim puts in a call to Henrietta Belvedere, Jessica’s boss.

‘You’re lucky you caught me,’ the other woman says, making it obvious she feels the luck to be one-sided. ‘I’m completely frantic today.’

‘Jessica Gold mentioned she attended a team-bonding event back in August sometime. A weekend in Norfolk?’

There’s a brief silence, during which Kim pictures the other woman drumming her restless, cigarette-free fingers insistently on her desk.

‘I’m afraid that doesn’t ring any bells. We don’t go in for that sort of thing here. Grown-up people pretending to be trees and goodness knows what else. Better to take everyone down to the pub and get rip-roaring drunk, I think.’

Quite, Kim agrees.

First the photograph, now the lie about the weekend. Clearly Jessica Gold also has things she’d rather keep hidden. The obvious conclusion is that she has been having an affair. Was someone with her when she said she was off on a team-building weekend in Norfolk? Perhaps the mysterious Ben she claimed was responsible for the compromising Facebook photo. Having met the Gold family, Kim isn’t surprised Jessica wants to keep that episode under wraps, but she needs to realize she is in a very serious situation. Whatever charges she and Dominic Lacey end up facing, there is no doubt there will be a court case, if not two, and every detail of her life will be picked over.

People in Jessica Gold’s position aren’t allowed the luxury of secrets.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

When Travis comes home from the hospital he’s in a foul mood. He goes straight into the kitchen and gets himself a beer from the fridge. Sourness seeps out of him and snakes its way along the hallway and into the living room where I am watching a programme on Catch Up in which ordinary people are filmed watching television in their own homes and commenting on what they see.

‘Is this it?’ says Travis, coming in from the kitchen brandishing the bottle of beer in his hand like a weapon. ‘Is this your life from now on? No more working, just slobbing around watching TV all day?’

The unfairness of this stings. Surely I’m allowed to wallow for a bit after what I’ve been through. Then I remember I haven’t actually been through what he thinks I’ve been through. It’s getting harder and harder to remember what is and isn’t real. I see I’ve started to think of myself as a victim, which of course I am, only not quite in the way I mean.

Travis sits down in the one armchair we own, rather than next to me on the sofa. We never sit in that chair on account of the lumpiness of the bottom cushion so I know something’s up.

‘What’s wrong with you anyway?’

The voice in my head is strong and confrontational, however the one that comes out of my mouth is whiny and self-pitying.

Travis takes a swig from his beer and glares at me. I can see the lower lid of his left eye twitching as it does when he is tired. I’ve been so focused on myself that I haven’t even thought about what effect all this has had on him, but now I’m reminded that he hasn’t been sleeping well either.

When I wake up in the night – which is every hour or so, if I’m lucky enough to sleep at all – I sometimes tiptoe into the living room and find Travis also awake, on the sofa, his eyes, curiously vulnerable without the glasses, gazing myopically into the darkness.

‘It’s like I don’t even know you,’ he says now, as if we are carrying on an earlier conversation only he has been privy to. ‘All this time we’ve been together and we might as well be strangers.’

‘Where did all this come from?’ I say.

He opens his mouth, with that extravagantly curved upper lip, as if he’s about to speak, and then thinks better of it.

I go back to watching the telly where a middle-aged couple who look half-cut are sitting side by side on a velvet sofa holding hands and chatting about the reality TV show they’re watching. I try to picture Travis and me in thirty years’ time.

My mind goes blank.

* * *

Kim isn’t prepared for how she reacts when seeing Dominic Lacey for the first time. The feeling is deep within her like someone is taking hold of her intestines and squeezing hard. The inside of her mouth is suddenly dry and she hopes Martin can’t hear her struggling to swallow. There is a strange smell in the room. In addition to the usual hospital stench of antiseptic and bleach with an acrid undercurrent of bedpans and dried blood, there’s an unpleasant musky scent she can’t place.

She hangs back by the door behind Robertson and Martin. The room is on the second floor of the hospital, and the windows running along the opposite wall give out on to the grey concrete of a different wing behind which lurks an equally grey sky. Dominic Lacey lies propped up on pillows. His eyes are open but so far he has yet to speak or make use of the notebook and pen laid out carefully on his bedside table. Medical staff are still not sure whether his brain function has been affected by the disruption to the oxygen supply during the hours he spent bleeding on the balcony while Jessica Gold waited inside for help to arrive. They are calling his survival a miracle. Though the cut to his throat was more superficial than first appeared, certainly than Jessica indicated in her account, he had to keep up a constant pressure on it to stop himself bleeding to death. If he’d allowed himself to slip into unconsciousness, chances are he wouldn’t have survived the night.

His will to live overrode his own body’s limitations. Kim finds that chilling.

There is a bandage around his throat through which the tracheostomy tube extrudes. His chest too is bandaged where the knife wounds are. One of the stab wounds collapsed a lung. Amazingly, both missed his heart. However, the fragment of china in the back of his neck did damage his spinal cord. If he lives it’s doubtful he will walk again.

Detective Superintendent Robertson is talking to one of the doctors.

‘As I say, you can talk to him for a few minutes, but at present we’ve no way of knowing how much he understands.’

The doctor – tall with long grey hair pulled back from a surprisingly youthful face, and jaunty blue suede kitten-heel shoes – appears unfazed by the infamy of her charge, unmoved by the knot of reporters still camped outside the main gate to the hospital. There is none of that bustling self-importance Kim has observed in people who find themselves in proximity to an international news story.