Suspect by Michael Robotham

Author:Michael Robotham
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

4

When it is over—the packing, the walking out the door and the cab ride to Jock’s doorstep—I feel like I did on my first day at boarding school. Abandoned. A single memory comes back to me, with all the light and shade of reality. I am standing on the front steps of Charterhouse as my father hugs me and feels the sob in my chest. “Not in front of your mother,” he whispers.

He turns to walk away and says to my mother, “Not in front of the boy,” as she dabs at her eyes.

Jock insists I’ll feel better after a shower, a shave and a decent meal. He orders takeout from his local Indian, but I’m asleep on the sofa before it arrives. He eats alone.

In the motley half-light, leaking through the blinds, I can see tinfoil trays stacked beside the sink, with orange-and-yellow gravy erupting over the sides. The TV remote is pressing into my spine and the weekly program guide is wedged under my head. I don’t know how I managed to sleep at all.

My mind keeps flashing back to Julianne and the look she gave me. It went far beyond disappointment. Sadness is not a big enough word. It was as though something had frozen inside her. Very rarely do we fight. Julianne can argue with passion and emotion. If I try to be too clever or become insensitive she accuses me of arrogance and I see the hurt in her eyes. This time I saw only emptiness. A vast, windswept landscape that a man could die trying to cross.

Jock is awake. I can hear him singing in the shower. I try to swing my legs to the floor but nothing happens. For a fleeting moment I fear I’m paralyzed. Then I realize that I can feel the weight of the blankets. Concentrating my thoughts, my legs grudgingly respond.

The bradykinesia is becoming more obvious. Stress is a factor in Parkinson’s disease. I’m supposed to get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly and try not to worry about things.

Yeah, right!

Jock lives in a mansion block overlooking Hampstead Heath. Downstairs there is a doorman who holds an umbrella over your head when it rains. He wears a uniform and calls people “Guv” or “Madam.”

Jock and his second wife used to own the entire top floor, but since the divorce he can only afford a one-bedroom apartment. He also had to sell his Harley and give her the cottage in the Cotswolds. Whenever he sees an expensive sports car he claims it belongs to Natasha.

“When I look back it’s not the ex-wives that frighten me, it’s the mothers-in-law,” he says. Since his divorce he has become, as Jeffrey Bernard would say, a sort of roving dinner guest on the outside looking in and a fly on the 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.

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