Michael Robotham - Suspect

I kneel beside her, my knees almost touching hers.

"I didn't know how to tell you. I needed time to think. I couldn't talk to my parents or friends, who were going to feel sorry for me and give me chin-up speeches and brave smiles. That's why I went to see Elisa. She's a stranger, but also a friend. There's good in her."

Julianne wipes her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater and stares at the fireplace.

"I didn't plan to sleep with her. It just happened. I wish I could change that. We're not having an affair. It was one night."

"What about Catherine McBride? Did you sleep with her?"

"No."

"Well why did she apply to be your secretary? What would make her think you would ever give her a job after what she put us through?"

"I don't know."

Julianne looks at her bruised hand and then at my cheek.

"What do you want, Joe? Do you want to be free? Is that it? Do you want to face this alone?"

"I don't want to drag you and Charlie down with me."

My maudlin tone infuriates her. She bunches her fists in frustration.

"Why do you always have to be so fucking sure of yourself? Why can't you just admit you need help? I know you're sick. I know you're tired. Well, here's a news flash: we're all sick and we're all tired. I'm sick of being marginalized and tired of being pushed aside. Now I want you to leave."

"But I love you."

"Leave!"

"What about us? What about Charlie?"

She gives me a cold unwavering stare. "Maybe I still love you, Joe, but at the moment I can't stand you."

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. 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 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.

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.

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?