McDermid, Val - Trick of the Dark

By the end of that first term, I was babysitting for the Newsams about once a week. I still went out drinking with Corinna, and dropped in whenever I was at that end of town. For most of that term, I was homesick and lonely, cast adrift by geography and social class. But Corinna made me feel there was somewhere I belonged, somewhere I had value. There wasn't much of that elsewhere in my life in those days.

Jay paused. She knew what she wanted to say. Was there any point in even typing a line that could never survive the most cursory of edits? 'Yes,' she said. She wanted to see what it would look like on the page.

I would have cheerfully killed for Corinna Newsam then.

How to get to Oxford without Maria, without Maria ever realising: that had been the plan. That was the challenge for Charlie. If the stereotypes held, it should have been laughably easy; psychiatrist versus dentist, no contest. But Charlie knew Maria too well to rely on that. Maria often saw the bigger picture while Charlie was focused on the detail. Maria had been the first one to warn her of the dangers of the Bill Hopton situation. The first of many. The many she'd chosen to ignore because she'd been so fixated on pure principle over dirty practicality. And look what that had cost her.

She wondered now whether she could have done anything differently. She remembered their conversation the night before she'd delivered the report that had set the ball rolling. Although Charlie was scrupulous about not revealing confidential details to Maria, she'd always talked about the issues raised by her cases. 'Tomorrow I've got to write a report that's going to piss everybody off,' she'd said. 'They've got somebody in the frame for a particularly unpleasant murder. But I don't think he did it. I think he's a psychopath and I think there's every likelihood that one day he will graduate to a full-blown sex killer, but he isn't there yet. Some of my colleagues would say that's reason enough to put up and shut up, but I can't do it.'

Maria had probed her options and the depth of her convictions, then she'd sat at the dinner table looking worried. 'You need to not do this,' she said.

'I can't go against my principles.'

'Isn't there another way? Can't you excuse yourself from the case? Pretend you've got a conflict of interest?'

Charlie sighed. 'I don't see how.'

Maria considered. 'If you come up with this report, they won't use it in court, will they?'

'Of course not. It completely undermines what isn't a very strong case to start with. They might bring someone else in to see if a second opinion will come out differently, but there's no way the prosecution will use me now.'

'In that case, you have to persuade the police and the prosecutor to keep really quiet about your involvement. Let the court sort it out. Keep your nose clean, Charlie. You know what it's like when a prosecution fails. Somebody has to carry the can.'

And if things had played out the way Maria had suggested, things might have been OK. But they hadn't. They'd gone as wrong as they could. Someone had leaked her report to Hopton's defence team and they'd come looking for Charlie. They'd dragged her into the witness box and then it had been all over for the prosecution.

That would have been embarrassing but Charlie's reputation and career would have survived. If they'd listened to her recommendation that Hopton should be held in a secure mental hospital, it might even have been described as a reasonable outcome. But instead, Hopton had gone on to murder four women and nobody was looking past Charlie for someone to blame.

Corinna was right. She was more desperate than she could ever admit for something that would make her feel good about herself. Putting right a miscarriage of justice would do just that. And the chance to spend time with Lisa Kent might even be the icing on the cake.

Now Charlie drained the pasta and returned it to the pan, then tipped in a slug of the spicy salsiccia and tomato sauce she'd cooked earlier. 'Dinner,' she shouted, dishing it up and bringing it to the kitchen table. Maria arrived, still half-absorbed in the newspaper feature section. She found her chair by habit and sat down, the thin line of a frown between her eyebrows.

'Scary,' she said, setting the paper to one side and acknowledging her meal with a satisfied nod.

'What's scary?'

'Scary in a good way,' Maria said, helping herself to the bowl of Parmesan curls Charlie had prepared. 'This stem cell stuff. You know I told you a while back that we're going to be able to grow new teeth for ourselves from these little bundles of cells?'

Charlie, who generally paid attention to Maria because she was a trained listener as well as an instinctive one, nodded. 'I remember. You said the big problem was figuring out how the cells knew what kind of tooth to be.'

'Exactly. Because nobody wants a molar where an incisor should be. Not even if it's their own molar.' Maria gobbled a couple of forkfuls of pasta. 'Mmm, that's good. Well, there's a team of dental researchers who reckon they're close to cracking it.' She rolled her eyes.

'But that's good, isn't it?'

'It's good if you're the person who has a big hole where their teeth should be. It's not so great if you're the dentist who has invested time and money getting to be the best dental implant person north of the Severn-Trent watershed.' Maria reached for the glass of water sitting by her plate and took a swig. 'Here's hoping it takes them longer than they think to unravel the puzzle. Long enough for me to make my money and retire.'

Charlie laughed. 'You're barely forty.'

Maria's hand stopped halfway to her mouth. 'And just how long do you think I want to spend my days staring into the ruins of people's mouths?'

It had never occurred to Charlie that they should discuss retirement. She loved her job. No, strike that. She'd loved the job that used to be hers. When she'd had a functioning career, retirement had been for other people. They'd have had to carry her out kicking and screaming. She'd assumed Maria felt the same. Apparently she'd been wrong. Maybe her accusers were right. Maybe she wasn't much of a psychiatrist. 'I thought you loved your job.' It sounded like a dare.

Maria's eyebrows twitched. 'I love the challenge. I love the difficult cases. But the routine stuff? What's to love? What I always envisaged was giving up general practice in a few years and just doing a few days a month on the really specialist stuff.'

'You never said.'

Maria reached out and smoothed Charlie's hair. 'It never came up. Charlie, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but we hardly ever talk about the future. Or the past. I can't think of another couple who live more in the present than we do.'

'And that's a good thing.' Charlie pushed her food round.

'But that's not how it's been with you lately.' Maria's voice had softened and she laid her fork on the plate. 'Even since the Hopton business, you've been brooding over the past and worrying about the future.'

'That's what you do when the present isn't very rosy.'

Maria sighed. 'I know it's crap, having to get by on whatever crumbs you can pick up to keep you from going mad with frustration and boredom, but this is temporary, Charlie. Everybody says you're going to come out of this with a clean sheet.'

Charlie snorted. 'Professionally, maybe. But as far as the public's concerned…'

'It's not the public that hire you to profile and treat.'

'Maria, I'm no use as an expert witness if I'm so notorious that they can't find a jury that hasn't already made its mind up about me.'

Maria stared at her plate. 'You don't have to go to court. There's other things you do that satisfy you just as much. At least, that's what you always said.'

Charlie said nothing. There was no answer that didn't make her sound shallow and superficial, and that wasn't how it was for her. Giving evidence in court mattered because it was one of the few aspects of her work that had a concrete end product. If she did her job right, the guilty went to jail, the innocent walked free and the ill got treatment. Even if things didn't work out the way she believed was right, there was still a line that was drawn. An enclosure. When you spent your working life dealing with people whose mental processes were off-kilter enough to bring them to your door, anything that could be boxed off was something to be craved. Now she'd experienced the benefits of being an expert witness, she wasn't sure she could continue her work without them.