Michael Robotham - Suspect

I'm not asking as a favor. He either does this or our long association is irredeemably ended. Jock fumbles for an excuse but can't find one. Mostly he wants to run for cover. He has always been a coward unless he can physically intimidate someone. I won't give him the chance to wheedle out. I know that he's lied to the police. I also have too many details about the assets he kept hidden from his ex-wives.

His voice is sharp. "They're going to catch up with you, Joe."

"They catch up to all of us," I say. "Call me on this number as soon as you can."

In the third form, during a holiday in Wales, I took some matches from the china bowl on the mantelpiece to make a campfire. It was near the end of a dry summer and the grass was brittle and brown. Did I mention the wind?

My smoldering bundle of twigs sparked a grass fire that destroyed two fences, a 200-year-old hedgerow and threatened a neighboring barn full of winter feed. I raised the alarm, screaming at the top of my lungs as I ran home with blackened cheeks and smoky hair.

I crawled into the far corner of the loft in the stables, wedging myself against the sloping roof. I knew my father was too big to reach me. I lay very still, breathing in the dust and listening to the sirens of the fire engines. I imagined all sorts of horrors. I pictured entire farms and villages ablaze. They were going to send me to jail. Carey Moynihan's brother had been sent to reform school because he set fire to a train carriage. He came out meaner than when he went in.

I spent five hours in the loft. Nobody shouted or threatened me. Dad said I should come out and take my punishment like a man. Why do young boys have to act like men? The look of disappointment on my mother's face was far more painful than the sting of my father's belt. What would the neighbors say?

Prison seems much closer now than it did then. I can picture Julianne holding up our baby across the table. "Wave to Daddy," she tells him (it's a boy, of course), as she tugs down her skirt self-consciously, aware of the dozens of inmates staring at her legs.

I picture redbrick buildings rising out of the asphalt. Iron doors with keys the size of a man's palm. I see metal landings, meal queues, exercise yards, swaggering guards, nightsticks, pisspots, lowered eyes, barred windows and a handful of snapshots taped to a cell wall.

What happens to someone like me in jail?

Simon is right. I can't run. And just like I learned in third form, I can't hide forever. Bobby wants to destroy me. He doesn't want me dead. He could have killed me a dozen times over, but he wants me alive so I can see what he's doing and know that it's him.

Will the police keep watching my home or will they call off the surveillance to focus on Wales? I don't want that. I need to know that Julianne and Charlie are safe.

The phone rings. Jock has an address for a Bridget Aherne at a hospice in Lancashire.

"I talked to the senior oncologist. They give her only weeks."

I can hear him unwrapping the plastic from a cigar. It's early. Maybe he's celebrating. Both of us have settled for an uneasy truce. Like an old married couple, we recognize the half-truths and ignore the irritations.

"There's a photograph of you in today's papers," he says. "You look like a banker rather than a 'Most Wanted.' "

"I don't photograph well."

"Julianne gets a mention. They describe her as being 'overwrought and emotional when visited by reporters.' She told them to fuck off."

"Yeah, that's what I figured, too."

I can hear him blowing smoke. "I got to hand it to you, Joe. I always took you for a boring fart. Likable enough, but virtuous. Look at you now! Two mistresses and a wanted man."

"I didn't sleep with Catherine McBride."

"Shame. She was good in the sack." He laughs wryly.

"You should listen to yourself sometimes, Jock."

To think I once envied him. Look at what he's become: a crude parody of a right-wing, middle-class chauvinist and bigot. I no longer trust him, but I need another favor.

"I want you to stay with Julianne and Charlie-just until I sort this out."

"You told me not to go near her."

"I know."

"Sorry, I can't help you. Julianne isn't returning my calls. I figure you must have told her about Catherine and the letters. She's pissed off at both of us now."

"At least call her; tell her to be careful. Tell her to let no one into the house."

The Land Rover has a top speed of forty and a tendency to oversteer into the center of the road. It looks more like a museum piece than a motorcar and people honk when they pass as if I'm driving for charity. This could be the most perfect getaway vehicle ever conceived because nobody expects a wanted man to escape so slowly.

I use the back roads to reach Lancashire. A moldy road map from the glove compartment, circa 1965, keeps me on track. I pass through villages with names like Puddinglake and Woodplumpton. On the outskirts of Blackpool, at a near-deserted petrol station, I use the bathroom to clean up. I sponge the mud from my trousers and hold them under the hand dryer before changing my shirt and washing the cuts on my hands.

The Squires Gate Hospice is fixed to a rocky headland as though rusted there by the salt air. The turrets, arched windows and slate roof look Edwardian, but the outbuildings are newer and less intimidating.

Flanked by poplar trees, the driveway curves around the front of the hospital and emerges into a parking area. I follow the signs to the palliative care ward on the ocean side. The corridors are empty and the stairways almost tidy. A black nurse with a shaved head sits behind a glass partition staring at a screen. He is playing a computer game.

"You have a patient called Bridget Aherne."

He looks down at my knees, which are no longer the same color as the rest of my trousers.

"Are you family?"

"No. I'm a psychologist. I need to speak to her about her son."

His eyebrows arch. "Didn't know she had a son. She doesn't get many visitors."

I follow his smooth, rolling walk along the corridor, where he turns beneath the staircase and takes me through double doors leading outside. A loose gravel pathway dissects the lawn where two bored-looking nurses share a sandwich on a garden seat.

We enter a single-story annex nearer to the cliffs and emerge into a long shared ward with maybe a dozen beds, half of them empty. A skinny woman with a smooth skull is propped up on pillows. She is watching two young children who are scribbling on drawing paper at the end of her bed. Elsewhere, a one-legged woman in a yellow dress sits in a wheelchair in front of a television with a crocheted blanket on her lap.

At the far end of the ward, through two doors, are the private rooms. He doesn't bother to knock. The room is dark. At first I don't notice anything except the machines. The monitors and dials create the illusion of medical mastery: as though everything is possible if you calibrate the machinery and press the right buttons.

A middle-aged woman, with sunken cheeks, is lying at the center of the web of tubes and leads. She has a blond wig, pendulous breasts and tar-colored lesions on her neck. A pink chemise covers her body, with a tattered red cardigan hanging over her shoulders. A bag of solution drips along tubing that snakes in and out of her body. There are black lines around her wrists and ankles-not dark enough to be tattoos and too uniform to be bruises.

"Don't give her any cigarettes. She can't clear her lungs. Every time she coughs it shakes the tubes loose."

"I don't smoke."

"Good for you." He takes a cigarette from behind his ear and transfers it to his mouth. "You can find your own way back."

The curtains are drawn. Music is coming from somewhere. It takes me a while to realize there is a radio playing softly on the bedside table, next to an empty vase and a Bible.