Michael Robotham - Suspect

She bites her bottom lip and looks past me toward the church. "Well, if you want to see him you'll find him over there."

I turn to look.

"He's in the cemetery." Realizing how blunt the statement sounds, she adds, "I'm sorry if you knew him."

Without making a conscious decision I find myself sitting down on the steps. "We used to work together," I explain. "It was a long time ago."

She glances over her shoulder. "Would you like to come in and sit down?"

"Thank you."

The kitchen smells of sterilized bottles and porridge. There are crayons and pieces of paper spread over the table and chair. She apologizes for the mess.

"What happened to Mr. Erskine?"

"I only know what the neighbors told me. Everyone in the village was pretty shook up by what happened. You don't expect that sort of thing-not round these parts."

"What sort of thing?"

"They say he came across someone trying to rob the place, but I don't see how that explains anything. What sort of burglar ties an old man to a chair and tapes his mouth? He lived for two weeks. Some folks say he had a heart attack, but I heard he died of dehydration. It was the hottest fortnight of the year…"

"When was this?"

"August just gone. I reckon some folks are feeling guilty because nobody noticed him missing. He was always pottering in the garden and taking walks by the lake. Someone from the church choir knocked on the door and a man came to read the gas meter. The front door was unlocked, but nobody thought to go inside."

The baby is squirming in her arms. "Are you sure you won't have a cup of tea? You don't look too good."

I can see her lips moving and hear the question, but I'm not really listening. The ground has dropped away beneath me like a plunging lift. She's still talking."…a really nice old man, people say. A widower. You probably know that already. Don't think he had any other family…"

I ask to use her phone and need both hands to hold the receiver. The numbers are barely legible. Louise Elwood answers. I have to stop myself from shouting. "The deputy headmistress at St. Mary's-you said that she resigned for family reasons."

"Yes. Her name was Alison Gorski."

"When was that?"

"About eighteen months ago. Her mother died in a house fire and her father was badly burned. She moved to London so she could nurse him. I think he's in a wheelchair."

"How did the fire start?"

"They think it was a case of mistaken identity. Someone put a petrol bomb through the mail slot. The newspapers thought it might have been an anti-Jewish thing, but there was never anything more said."

A rush of fear becomes liquid on my skin. My eyes fix on the young woman who is watching me anxiously from beside the stove. She is frightened of me. I have brought something sinister into her house.

I make another call. Mel picks up immediately. I don't give her time to speak. "The car that hit Boyd, what happened to the driver?" My voice sounds strident and thin.

"The police have been here, Joe. A detective called Ruiz…"

"Just tell me about the driver."

"It was a hit and run. They found the four-wheel drive a few blocks away."

"And the driver?"

"They think it was probably a teenage joy rider. There was a thumbprint on the steering wheel, but it matched nothing on file."

"Tell me exactly what happened."

"Why? What's this got to do…"

"Please, Mel."

She stumbles over the first part of the story, trying to remember whether it was seven thirty or eight thirty that evening when Boyd went out. It upsets her to think she could have forgotten a detail like this. She worries that Boyd might be growing fainter in her memories.

It was Bonfire night. The air was laced with gunpowder and sulfur. Neighborhood kids, giddy with excitement, had gathered around bonfires built from scrap wood on allotments and waste ground.

Boyd often went out of an evening for tobacco. He went to his local for a quick pint and picked up his favorite blend from a liquor store on the way. He wore a fluorescent vest and a canary-yellow helmet. His gray ponytail hung down his back. He paused at an intersection on Great Homer Street.

Perhaps he turned at the last moment, when he heard the car. He might even have seen the driver's face in that fraction of a second before he disappeared beneath the bulbar. His body was dragged for a hundred yards beneath the chassis, caught in the twisted frame of his motorcycle.

"What's going on?" asks Mel. I imagine her wide red mouth and timid gray eyes.

"Lucas Dutton, where is he now?"

Mel answers in a calm, quavering voice. "He works for some government advisory body on teenage drug use."

I remember Lucas. He dyed his hair; played golf off a low handicap and collected matchbooks and blends of scotch. His wife was a drama teacher. They drove a Skoda and went on holidays to a campground in Bognor. They had twin girls…

Mel is demanding an explanation, but I talk over her. "What happened to the twins?"

"You're scaring me, Joe."

"What happened to them?"

"One of them died last Easter of a drug overdose."

I am ahead of her now, reading a list of names: Justice McBride, Melinda Cossima, Rupert Erskine, Lucas Dutton, Alison Gorski-all were involved in the same child protection case. Erskine is dead. The others have all lost someone close to them. What has this got to do with me? I only interviewed Bobby the once. Surely that isn't enough to explain the windmills, the Spanish lessons, the Tigers and Lions… Why did he spend months living in Wales, landscaping my parent's garden and fixing the old stables?

Mel is threatening to hang up on me, but I can't let her go. "Who put together the legal submission for the care order?"

"I did, of course."

"You said Erskine was on holiday. Who signed off on the psych report?"

She hesitates. Her breathing changes. She is about to lie.

"I don't remember?"

More insistent this time. "Who signed the psych report?"

She speaks straight through me, directly into the past.

"You did."

"How? When?"

"I put the form in front of you and you signed. You thought it was a foster-parent authorization. It was your last day in Liverpool. We were having farewell drinks at the Windy House."

I moan inwardly, the phone still to my ear.

"My name was in Bobby's files?"

"Yes."

"You took it out of the folders before you showed them to me?"

"It was a long time ago. I thought it didn't matter."

I can't answer her. I let the phone fall from my hand. The young mother is clutching her baby tightly in her arms, jiggling him up and down to calm his cries. As I retreat down the steps, I hear her calling her older son inside. Nobody wants to be near me. I am like an infectious disease. An epidemic.

George Woodcock called the ticking of the clock a mechanical tyranny that turned us into servants of a machine that we created. We are held in fear of our own monster-just like Baron von Frankenstein.

I once had a patient, a widower living alone, who became convinced that the ticking of a clock above his kitchen table sounded like human words. The clock would give him short commands. "Go to bed!" "Wash the dishes!" "Turn off the lights!" At first he ignored the sound, but the clock repeated the instructions over and over, always using the same words. Eventually, he began to follow the orders and the clock took over his life. It told him what to have for dinner and what to watch on TV, when to do the laundry, which phone calls to return…

When he first sat in my consulting room, I asked him whether he wanted a tea or a coffee. He didn't reply at first. He nonchalantly wandered over to the wall clock and after a moment he turned and said that a glass of water would be fine.