The Various Haunts of Men (46 page)

‘What are you eating?’

‘Raw, organic.’

‘What?’

‘Vegetables, a bit of fruit. Water. They recommend coffee enemas.’

‘Absolutely, categorically not, Karin. You can do yourself a lot of harm. Listen, it isn’t what you are eating that’s worrying
me so much as what you are not – you need good nourishment. Of course you need fresh fruit and veg, but you also need milk, eggs, bit of cheese, lots of fish, a bit of yeast to give you extra vitamin B, wholegrains – oats are best. A couple of glasses of good red wine every evening.’

‘You’ve just crammed a dozen toxic substances into one sentence.’

Cat snorted and poured herself a second mug
of tea.

‘What can you do about my back? And my general mopes? Do I live with those while I get better?’ Karin’s eyes were huge and anxious on Cat’s face.

‘Depends. If you had a scan so that I knew what was wrong with your back I’d feel happier about treating it. I mean, paracetamol is all very well … I would like to prescribe a mild antidepressant … one of the newer kind, the SSRI group. But
I suppose they’re full of toxins. Some aromatherapy is said to have uplifting properties but I’m no expert. It’s nice and cosy though.’

‘I know, I go every week. It’s cosy … not sure it’s much use.’

‘If we do pinpoint what’s wrong in your back, I’d possibly send you to see Aidan Sharpe. He’s very careful, I have a lot of faith in him … he wouldn’t treat you at all if he didn’t think it was right.
It might well help the back pain.’

‘OK.’

‘But he would want you to get a scan too.’

‘OK.’ Karin sounded suddenly exhausted and defeated. She sat, staring down into her empty mug.

‘I think you should start on the course of antidepressants. They’ll work quickly … a week and you’ll start feeling better. If you’re still serious about tackling this your way – or my way, come to that – you need
to be on top and you’re not. Let’s get your mood up and your fighting spirit will come back. Deal?’

Karin was silent for a moment. ‘Go over it all again.’

‘Right. See me later this morning. I’ll get them to put you in at half eight, before the rest of surgery. I’ll have a look at you, prescribe your tablets so you can start at once. And book an MRI scan at BG. For a time when I can come with
you. It’s a bit scary. Meanwhile, you go and get a double dose of sweet smells and then come to lunch and I’ll put some decent food inside you. Don’t look like that, it’s our own eggs and they’re organic. Let’s go from there. And don’t let things get like this again. Talk to me, talk to Chris, ring us whenever. Don’t ever sit here brooding, especially when Mike’s away. Things grow.’

‘God, they
did.’

‘There’s a trick about the nightmares too. Write down the gist of them – keep pen and paper by the bed. In the morning, take the paper and put a match to it. Watch it burn and grind up the bits to ash. You’re burning up the nightmares so you won’t have them again. Old-fashioned trick cyclists’ tip.’

Cat wound her scarf round her neck and picked up her car keys. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

Chris was awake when she got back into bed. ‘Is Karin OK?’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘Frightened.’

‘You’re a good girl.’

Cat pressed her face into his warm back. ‘She had that look,’ she said. Chris grunted, understanding.

A week later, she drove Karin to Bevham.

Something had happened since her visit in the early hours of the morning. Karin had lost her vibrant and powerful confidence in the road
she had chosen to take and twice telephoned Cat, once to ask for the scan, the second time to agree to the blood test which would tell them more about her condition.

‘Though I don’t understand what anyone can see from looking at a blob of my blood.’

‘They’ll look for tumour markers.’

The result had been worrying and the blood test had also shown that Karin was anaemic.

‘Which accounts for
your tiredness lately. We can help with that.’

It was never easy, knowing how much to tell a patient and in what detail. When she had first come to the surgery Karin had preferred to get on with following her own treatment plan, taking each day as it came and not investigating too much into her physical state. So long as she felt well, she was well, had been her firm line.

Now she did not feel
well.

‘I want to know. I have to be able to see what I’m up against. You can’t fight an enemy if you don’t know how strong it is.’

‘OK, I’ll try and help, though these things are always relative, you know. Seeing what a scan or a blood test
looks like is one thing, making any sort of prognosis is another.’

Now, as they went along the bypass towards Bevham, Karin said suddenly, ‘Do you believe
in ghosts?’

Cat laughed. ‘No. No, I don’t think I do.’

‘But you do believe …?’

‘If you mean in God, I have to. I’ve seen too much to let me believe otherwise, and I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t.’

‘Why not ghosts then?’

‘Not sure … I suppose I think they’re unnecessary. And there’s so often a rational explanation of so-called ghostly sightings.’

‘So you don’t think we come back?’

‘Not
as ghosts in the usual sense. Do you?’

Karin did not reply, but after another moment said, ‘What about places which have a bad atmosphere. People would usually say haunted, but anyway, places that have a definite sense of evil surrounding them.’

‘Yes,’ Cat said quietly, ‘I do believe in those. I don’t know why it is so, but it sometimes definitely is. We once went into a house in France when
we were on holiday, before we had the children – a pretty house, charming really, and it was a lovely evening. We were looking for a room to stay in for the night and someone had sent us there because the hotel was full. When we walked in I had the most appalling sense of fear … there was evil in there, it hit me in the face the moment I walked in. Nothing happened, there was nothing to see … but
I couldn’t have stayed there. I couldn’t wait to get out again.’

‘Did you find out why?’

Cat shook her head.

‘I’ve had the same experience with people. I remember a waitress in a restaurant in London … Just some pleasant ordinary little bistro, about twenty years ago. When she took our order it started and it got worse … she was a witch. I’m still convinced there was real evil about her … the
friend I was with felt it too. But what was it really? She didn’t look at all unusual but I didn’t want her near me.’

‘Have you been having night frights again?’

‘A bit … nothing much. Your coming over jinxed them.’

‘Good. But if you do, talk about it. Don’t bottle it up.’

‘I’m still afraid.’

‘What about your healer?’

‘I talked to her about it yesterday. Now there’s the very opposite in
a house. I’ve never been anywhere like it. When you walk into the garden, before you even get to inside, you have this incredible sense that it is a healing place. There is such an air of peace and goodness. When I go, I just drink it in. I want to stay and be wrapped in it. Nothing can get to me there. These places … good vibes, evil vibes … I want to understand it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it to do with
being near death, Cat?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cat said. They turned into the hospital entrance as an ambulance came screaming out. ‘I simply don’t know.’

His hand which was holding the scalpel froze. Beneath it on the slab the chest cavity of the elderly woman was already exposed. He was working very late, comparing this heart and the diseased arteries surrounding it with the fresh, healthy one of the girl. It was absorbing, fascinating.

The sudden noise of a vehicle outside shocked him. It had driven up to the unit, turned, and stopped
not far away. Now, after the closing of a car door, there was silence again. It was after midnight. No one came here at this time. The security guard patrolled the main avenue of the business park and once in a while approached the turning into this side road, but he knew the sound of that van, which always reversed noisily without bothering to come to the end. He waited. The lights here could
not be seen from the main avenue, or by anyone walking up the side of the building. He had gone to a lot of trouble to make absolutely sure of it. But he was disturbed and his concentration had gone.

He looked down at the cadaver, annoyed. He could return her to the drawer still opened, because he had by
no means finished his work, or sew her up roughly to begin again next time he came in. He
had never been interrupted in this way before. It changed things and even the smallest change troubled him.

He waited, but there were no further sounds outside, and in the end, he was able to close the chest and restore everything quite calmly and without panic.

He hung up his gown, scrubbed his hands, checked the machines, switched off the lights and locked the building. Outside, it was cold
and very still with intensely bright stars.

He walked softly up the road a short way. A white van was clearly visible and there was a strip of light under the door of one of the lock-ups. So far as he knew, it was simply a store, without any office facility. He had never seen anyone there before.

He memorised the number plate of the van, which was filthy with grime and mud, and after waiting
for some while in the shadows, slipped back towards his own car. He started up the engine and drove slowly past the van. He parked a block away, and then went back on foot. Nothing. No one. He had not been heard, no one had been disturbed.

He sped away from the business park, not switching on his headlights until he reached the main road. He scarcely saw another vehicle. Back at his house, he
mixed himself a whisky and water, and switched on the lamp beside his chair. He would write up his notes tomorrow. Now, he wanted to think about Detective Sergeant Freya Graffham.

The weather had jerked forwards into warm spring. In CID, the sun coming through the large windows made
the room hot and stuffy. DC Coates sat at his desk, computer screen in front of him, his eyes glazed over. Freya
watched him for a moment, then got up and went to stand in front of him. There was no response.

‘Earth to Nathan … are you receiving?’

His eyes refocused but he still did not respond to her.

‘NATHAN.’

‘What? Gawd, Sarge, you might have give me ’eart attack.’

‘Anything to have you with us. Where were you, by the way?’

Nathan swivelled his chair round to face the window, screwing his eyes
up against the sun. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be sitting by one of them swimming pools they have at the posh houses in the Flixton Road? Nice book, long cool drink.’

‘It’s not that warm.’ She looked out at the roofs of the cars below glittering angrily in the sun. The magnolia tree in one of the opposite gardens had come into full, waxy bloom.

‘I was thinking just now, Sarge – what you said the
other day.’

‘What?’

‘Me and Em.’

‘Right.’

‘She’s away … went to Carlisle yesterday for a week to see her gran. I ’ate it, by myself in the flat. I don’t know how you stand living on your tod.’

‘I like it. For now.’

‘I was missing her half-hour after she’d gone. I don’t begrudge her, like, she loves her gran and the old lady ain’t been too well.’

‘But you miss her all the same.’

‘Yeah.
So I been thinking. Maybe you had a good idea there.’

‘About getting married?’

‘Yeah. I quite fancy it now, you know.’

‘Then do it. Don’t mess about.’

‘I might an’ all. What sort of a ring do you think I ought to get her?’

‘No sort. I think you ask her, and if she says yes, you take her to choose it for herself.’

‘Yeah, right, whatever I get won’t be what she wants. Do you think she’d know?’

‘She could probably take you to it blindfold. Meanwhile, there’s work.’

Nathan groaned. ‘I ’ate it at the moment. Everything’s stuck. Drugs op is bedded in sand, no news on the missing women. Any minute now they’ll second me on to shoplifting.’

‘Yes, I heard uniform want some surveillance in the arcade.’

‘Hanging about waiting for teenagers to nick top-shelf mags. Rather get back to my database.’

Freya sat down at her own desk. Nathan was right. She knew nothing about the drugs op beyond the fact that they were waiting for the off on a raid once they had enough information, but the place was full of pent-up officers hanging round the canteen drinking too much tea. Meanwhile, her own sense of frustration had reached boiling point. The investigation into the missing women had not moved an
inch further forward since the reconstruction of Debbie Parker’s early-morning walk, which had elicited virtually no public response. Nathan had drawn a blank on the jeweller’s list, on Starly and on the medium visited by Iris Chater. All Mrs Innes had told
him was that Mrs Chater had left a seance at her house at around nine o’clock in the evening. The rest of them had remained inside. Mrs Chater
had not returned home, nor apparently been seen by anyone since. Like Angela Randall and Debbie Parker, she had vanished into thin air. And any day now, Freya knew, the inquiry would be downgraded and she would be working on something else.

As if reading her thoughts, Nathan looked up from his computer screen. ‘White goods for us, Sarge, just you wait.’

Freya groaned. There had been a spate
of thefts of new freezers, dishwashers and washing machines a day after they had been delivered and all to empty houses waiting for new occupiers to move in. It seemed likely that there was a ring operating, with tip-offs going from delivery men to a separate set of thieves, who split the proceeds once the goods had been sold on, but so far, the police were always one step behind them. There might
be less interesting jobs, but Freya was hard put to think of one.

A fly was buzzing up the side of the window and down again, up, bzzzzz, and down again, bzzzzz. She thought she might join the frustrated drugs-op team down in the tea room.

Bzzzzz.

The ringing of the phone at her elbow made her jump.

‘DS Graffham.’