Tilly Bagshawe - Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow

‘Sports news now, and in a major setback for the LA Rams …’

Nikki tuned out. Opening the door, she ran out into the still bright evening light.

She’d almost reached Sunset Boulevard when her phone rang. She stopped and answered, panting.

‘Hello?’

It was Trey. He was crying, sobbing so violently it was hard to make out his words. Nikki slipped into doctor mode.

‘Try to breathe, honey. Slow it down.’

Two long, rasping breaths shuddered down the line.

‘Good,’ said Nikki. ‘Now can you tell me what’s happened?’

‘Lisa!’ Trey blurted. ‘Lisa Flannagan.’

Trey had always had a soft spot for Lisa. Nikki could tell. The way he stared at her when she walked down the hall to the restroom, the shy smile he gave every time she came to his desk to pay for a session.

‘What about Lisa?’ Nikki asked kindly. ‘Whatever it is, I’m sure it can’t be that bad, Trey.’

‘She’s dead!’ Trey sobbed.

A low ringing had started in Nikki’s ears. She watched the traffic crawl past her as if in a dream.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean she’s dead. Murdered!’ Trey started to weep uncontrollably. ‘I heard it on the news.’

Nikki’s knees buckled beneath her. She’d seen Lisa yesterday, alive and well and full of plans for her future. This couldn’t be right. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive. Oh God, Doc, it’s awful. Some sicko cut her to pieces! Dumped her by the side of the freeway.’

Nikki gasped. The news report she’d heard earlier! About the young woman dumped off the 10. That was Lisa ?

‘Dr Roberts? Dr Roberts, are you still there?’

Trey’s voice whined out of her earpiece but Nikki didn’t answer.

Guilt crept over her like a spider. While she’d been envying Lisa’s hope and youth, while she’d been judging her, Lisa had been … Oh God.

She tried not to think about it, but the horrifying images crowding into Nikki’s brain wouldn’t stop.

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Trey,’ she rasped, and hung up.

A new nightmare had begun.

‘We’re looking for Dr Roberts. Dr Nicola Roberts. Now it’s a simple question, son. Is she here or isn’t she?’

The two cops hovered menacingly in front of Trey Raymond’s desk. At least, it felt menacing to Trey. Then again, they were cops, and Trey was black and a former meth-dealer from Westmont, South LA’s ‘Death Alley’, so the three men weren’t ever going to be friends.

‘She’s with a patient right now.’

One of the cops, the shorter, fatter, older one with big, wet, larva-like white lips, regarded Trey with unadulterated contempt.

‘In there?’ he asked, nodding towards Nikki’s office door.

He wasn’t wearing uniform and he hadn’t showed Trey his badge. Neither of them had, for that matter. But he spoke with the innate, entitled authority of a police officer. It didn’t occur to Trey to question him.

‘Yes, in there,’ Trey confirmed. ‘But like I said, Dr Roberts is with a patient. She can’t be disturbed while she’s in session.’

‘Is that a fact?’ The fat cop smiled unpleasantly, moving towards the door.

‘Leave it, Mick.’ His taller, younger, more attractive partner put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘We can wait.’

‘Wait?’ Larva Lips looked furious, but his partner ignored him, smiling at Trey and taking a seat on the Italian leather couch in the waiting room. Picking up a copy of Psychology Today, he asked casually: ‘It’s fifty minutes, right? A therapy session? I remember from when my wife left me.’

‘Which one?’ Larva Lips snarled, obviously not best pleased to have been ‘reined in’ in front of Trey.

‘All of them,’ his partner grinned. ‘I was a wreck every time.’

Larva Lips didn’t smile back but sat down, lowering his ample backside into an armchair where he simmered belligerently. Trey had encountered scores of LAPD like him growing up: knee-jerk racists, Blue Lives Matter assholes who shot first and thought later. Or not. Dude might as well have had a swastika tattooed on his forehead, so obvious were his prejudices. For all Trey knew, his partner might be every bit as rotten inside, but he was better educated and he hid it better. Maybe he thought he’d get more out of Dr Roberts if he played nice with her office staff?

Trey Raymond figured he’d learned a lot, working in a psychologist’s office.

‘How much longer?’ Larva Lips demanded, glaring at the clock on the wall as if it were to blame for his impatience.

‘The session ends in fifteen minutes,’ said Trey. He assumed the police were here to ask about Lisa, which only made him feel worse. The thought of these bozos, picking through Lisa’s private life like vultures pecking at a carcass, made him feel sick.

Trey had seen a lot of death growing up. A lot of murder too, but that was different. That was shootings, gang violence, and where Trey grew up that was a fact of life. Sad, for sure. But not shocking.

Not like this. Lisa wasn’t part of that world. She was white and rich and beautiful, part of a white, rich, beautiful world where shit like this didn’t happen. Dr Roberts came from the same world. Trey didn’t, but he’d been invited in by Dr Roberts’ husband, Doug, before he died. More than invited. Welcomed. Like a son.

These son-of-a-bitch cops had no business here, bringing their dark world into this bright one.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Trey offered the politer officer.

‘I’m fine thanks.’

‘You can get me a Coke,’ the fat one replied, without looking up from his phone. An unspoken ‘ boy ’ hung in the air.

Beneath the desk, Trey’s fists clenched. He longed to refuse, to tell the man they were all out, sorry. But a deep-rooted survival instinct kicked in. Don’t mess with cops. Not to their face, anyway.

Inside Nikki’s office, Anne Bateman recrossed her slender legs beneath her long linen skirt. All her movements were so graceful, so thoughtful and composed. Like a ballet dancer, thought Nikki admiringly. Only last night Nikki had dreamed about Anne again, dreams that were not overtly erotic but that certainly had something obsessional about them, something voyeuristic. Perhaps being a virtuoso violinist isn’t so dissimilar to being a ballerina? Nikki thought. Whatever the reason, Anne appeared to dance through life to the tune of some inner music, some rhapsody of her own creation.

‘She was your patient, wasn’t she? Like me,’ Anne asked.

‘You know I can’t tell you that,’ Nikki said gently.

Like everybody else, Anne had seen the grisly reports of Lisa Flannagan’s murder on the TV news. She’d been distressed by them, and understandably wanted to talk.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said quietly, staring down at her lap. ‘I know. I’ve passed her in the corridor a hundred times. Poor woman.’

‘Yes,’ said Nikki. She felt bad herself. Lisa had been so full of hope in their final session together, so focused on her future. A future that, as it turned out, didn’t exist.

It was too late to help Lisa Flannagan now. But Nikki could still help Anne Bateman. Beautiful, intoxicating Anne. In fact, Anne was the one patient who Nikki felt she was helping, consistently. A violin prodigy with a coveted position at the LA Phil, at only twenty-six years old Anne was already wildly successful. Although childlike in some ways, in others she had already lived a life far beyond her years. As a teenager she’d traveled and performed all over the world, eventually marrying young to an extremely wealthy, charismatic, and much older man.