Control, p.24
Control, page 24
‘I thought you came here to check up on me? To see if I was all right, how I was coping. I thought you’d come to make amends for what that bastard, that surgeon, did – or, rather, what he didn’t do, on the night my Edmund died. Not to go snooping in my private correspondence . . .’
Kash held the photograph up, as if to put the girl beaming happily on a sunny day up alongside Anna Chaloner herself. What a fool he’d been! Their eyes were the same. The colour of their skin. Even the way their hair turned to flame in the golden light . . .
‘You said, before, that Edmund wasn’t your only child.’
Anna Chaloner softened. ‘He was the only one I raised – but I was a foolish girl once and, like lots of foolish young girls, I made a mistake.’ She caught the way he was looking at her, as if he’d made an assumption. ‘No, not in the getting pregnant. Lots of girls get pregnant. No, my mistake was in listening to my mother. In giving up instead of flouting the convention, telling them all to jump off the top of a tall building, and getting on with the business of being a mother myself. Giving my Charlotte up for adoption was the most painful thing I’d ever done. There hasn’t been a day gone by, even with all that’s happened since, that I haven’t thought about it. What might have been, if only I’d had the support, if only I’d had my head screwed on. If only I’d been stronger. Why, I needn’t be living here in this shithole at all. It could have been me and my Charlotte and my Edmund in a nice little house, two up and two down, the three of us together. A family.’
Anna Chaloner reached out and plucked the photograph from Kash’s fingers.
‘She’s been a great comfort to me, ever since—’
‘Her name isn’t Charlotte, Mrs Chaloner. Well, is it?’
‘She’ll always be Charlotte to me.’
Kash breathed. ‘Her name is Claire. Claire Barker.’
Anna was lost, staring into the picture. ‘She said she wouldn’t mind if I called her Charlotte. When it was just the two of us, meeting for a coffee or a stroll or . . .’
‘Which is why you took Edmund all the way to the Victory. Where she worked.’
‘We’d started meeting for some months before. I wanted her to know . . . that I trusted her. Her hospital. Of course, she never knew her half-brother. Had never met him.’
She looked up. ‘But his loss has been our gain. She’s given me such strength. Oh, Angela helped where she could – but it was Charlotte, my Charlotte, who really helped.’
‘How did she help, Mrs Chaloner?’
‘More than you can possibly—’
‘Tell me,’ Kash said gently, though he wanted to scream the words out. TELL ME!
‘Doctor, Kash . . . I’m not sure I . . .’
‘It’s simple enough, Anna.’ His voice was still quiet, but there was steely determination in it, too. ‘How did she help? What did you have her do?’
‘Me?’ she gasped.
‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Like all the rest of them. Oh, they all have their reasons. The moments he scorned them or made them look like fools or just abandoned them. It’s different with you, though, isn’t it? How blind have I been? There’s a simple maxim they teach you in medical school, Anna. They call it Occam’s Razor. The simplest diagnosis is almost always the correct one. Don’t go looking for exotic maladies, don’t go looking for rare disorders that might get published, if it’s really just a common cold. Look at what’s in front of you. Diagnose what you see. And that’s what I should have been doing. Damn it, that’s what Mr Trenchard would have done . . .’ He stopped, running his hand through his hair. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘nobody could blame you. Your boy might still be here, if only Trenchard had cared. And at the inquest, where you might have said it all, where Ange had kicked open the door and practically begged you to do it, you didn’t say a word. This was why, wasn’t it, Anna? Because you’d already found a way, hadn’t you, to settle that score?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .’
‘Oh, I think you do.’
Anna’s face contorted. ‘I’ll have you struck off,’ she spat. ‘A doctor, forcing his way into a grieving mother’s house, accusing her—’
‘Where were you that night, Anna? The night Michael Trenchard—’
She looked at him pityingly. ‘Even if I’d wanted to – and, God damn him, I did want to – how do you think it might have worked? I’m a secretary. I turn up and I answer the phone and I take messages and, if someone in the office is feeling particularly lazy, I take dictation.’
‘You weren’t always a secretary, though, were you?’ Kash said.
She looked at him incredulously. ‘That was all a long time ago. I make the tea and I make the fucking coffee. All I had was Edmund! What kind of life is that – living here, day in, day out, every day the fucking same – without him? So yes, Kash, yes: I was once a nurse. And yes, I wanted the man dead. I wanted somebody to pay for what happened to my boy. What does that make me? I’ll tell you, Kash. Normal. That’s what it makes me. Sane. Anyone in their right mind would have the same thoughts. But did I put thought into action? Could I have? No, Kash. I wouldn’t know how. Me? A sixty-words-per-minute assassin? You’ve watched too many films. Now . . .’
She paused, but only to gather her breath; she had been flailing so wildly that she was already spent, backed up against the kitchen units and holding onto the counter as if she might crumble at any moment.
‘Now . . . get out of my house! Get out and never come back.’
Kash was already up and out of the kitchen door. Anna Chaloner was right behind him – as if, in her fury, she might thrust him bodily out of the flat. He looked back once, and over her shoulder he caught sight of Claire’s picture, still lying on the table.
The door slammed shut behind him.
He leaned against the wall, breathing hard. He’d come, assuming that Anna was the cuprit all along. That Ange had told her that Trenchard could communicate. That she’d gone back to break his fingers. Or perhaps asked Ange to? But now this?
Claire. Anna Chaloner’s daughter.
What could it mean?
To do what had been done to Mr Trenchard required two things: motive and expertise.
Well, motive was clear enough; Anna Chaloner hadn’t tried to deny it.
But expertise? Maybe she was right. It was a long time ago that she’d last exercised those skills. The practice of medicine, or of nursing, wasn’t like riding a bike. You got rusty. And then you forgot.
Maybe she had needed a helper.
A helper with all the necessary skills there at her fingertips, kept sharp with daily practice. He thought of the face in the picture, staring back at him with those beautiful dark eyes.
Not Anna Chaloner and Angela Warner, after all. Anna Chaloner and Claire.
Motive and expertise. Mother and long-lost daughter. Sister to a slaughtered brother. Or maybe just the sister, the daughter, on her own . . .? Claire had known about Trenchard’s aban-donment of Edmund, as he’d told her. She knew about the locker and the bag. About Kash’s own suspicions. And then about Trenchard being conscious, and soon to communicate.
Kash stumbled from the flat and out into the council block courtyard just as the rain began to fall in sheets of grey all across London. He glanced back to see Anna Chaloner watching him from the balcony. Then she stepped back inside, pulled the curtain across the windows and was gone.
He splashed on hurridly towards the main road, brow furrowed and gaze fixed only a metre ahead. The Valentine’s card. The plastic tap. The clamp across Mr Trenchard’s catheter. He should have seen it all along.
He sprinted for the nearest bus stop, waving his arm wildly to flag down the first taxi he saw.
‘Denmark Hill,’ he gasped as he tumbled into the back seat.
52
The windscreen wipers thumped a drumbeat warning and, by the time Kash ducked out of the cab and onto the kerb, the pounding rain made it hard to see anything clearly. The taxi pulled away through the overflowing gutter with a splash, soaking him to the knees, but Kash barely noticed. Already he was looking up. The newsagent was locking the corrugated steel shutter for the night, but there were lights on in the windows of the flat above. Kash saw a shadow move across the window blinds: a woman in stark relief, clasping a wine glass in one hand.
Someone was home.
Kash rushed to the door and hammered once, twice, three times with his fist. It had been a night much like this, he remembered, when Mr Trenchard had been found, the rain thrashing viciously at the rooftops of the Victory hospital.
When there was no answer he tried the buzzer, then knocked again, each time louder than the last, then stepped back into the rain, looked up at the window and, with his hands cupped to his mouth, shouted her name. At first the shadow in the window remained exactly where it was. The only response came from the newsagent who had finished locking up. He took one look at Kash, muttered, ‘Bleedin’ drunks . . .’
‘Claire!’ Kash thundered.
For a moment Kash stood dumbly, the rain streaming into his eyes, and stared at the door. A moment later, he threw himself bodily at it.
Knocking down a door was not like it was in the movies. It did not explode inwards in a shower of splinters, nor fly off cleanly at the hinges, spilling Kash into the shadowy stairwell. He had to hurl himself at it three times before he heard something give. Then he wrenched at the handle, hammered his shoulder into the wood again, and finally heard a crunch as the lock gave way. Only then did he step inside.
The stairwell was narrow and neglected. Paint flaked off the walls, the naked dangling lightbulb hung dead overhead, and the carpet under Kash’s feet was threadbare in patches, revealing weathered floorboards underneath.
He kicked through the takeaway menus scattered beneath the letterbox and leaped up the stairs three at a time.
He was about to hammer on the door at the top of the stairs, when something stopped him. He took a breath to steady himself and reached for the door handle. It was unlocked. He turned the handle softly, and pushed the door open.
As soon as he stepped inside he knew it was Claire he’d seen at the window, not Tiff. He could smell her perfume, ripe with honey and elderflower, floating in the air. He stopped in the hallway before venturing through. He could hear her humming, low and off-key, and he wondered, briefly, if perhaps she wasn’t alone.
Then he remembered what he had come here to do and walked directly into the living room.
Claire was in the kitchenette, stirring the bubbling pan of pasta sauce which sat on the hob. She was wearing her white dressing gown – evidently preparing for a cosy night in. She had a pair of headphones on and was swaying gently to the music, holding a glass of shiraz in one hand, oblivious to all the mayhem.
For a second she did not see him, and he just stood there, frozen in the moment, watching her, a million crazy thoughts tumbling through his brain. Perhaps if he didn’t move, things would stay the way they had been; he could have his old Claire, the one he had fallen in love with. Time would stand still.
Then catching sight of him out of the corner of her eye, she started, spilling her glass of wine over the stove. She yanked the headphones off, her eyes wide.
‘Kash! What the hell are you . . .’
Kash was shaking. He took one more step into the room.
For a moment he couldn’t speak.
‘How in hell did you get in here, Kash? Christ, you frightened the life out of me. And . . .’ She looked at him properly. ‘Look at the state of you . . . has something happened, Kash? Is it . . . Mr Trenchard?’
Kash ran a hand through his hair, squeezing rainwater out of his eyes.
‘Claire,’ he breathed. ‘I trusted you . . .’
The silence that followed frightened him. It was then that he knew he was right, all of it was right. Claire had been the one, the one to trap Mr Trenchard, and all along, all the time since, he’d been helping her torture him more. It was her name that Trenchard had been so desperate to say.
Claire.
‘Trusted me?’
She sounded incredulous, bewildered. My God, he thought, she was good, a chill running through him that was nothing to do with being soaked to the skin; almost completely believable. Almost. But then she would have had to be, wouldn’t she, to fool Mr Trenchard into letting his guard down? He dreaded to think how far she’d been willing to go in the role, how realistic her performance must have been.
The woman he loved.
A sadistic homicidal psychopath.
‘Kash, you’re going to have to help me out. I don’t understand.’ She was looking concerned now.
Kash held her gaze. Then, slowly, ‘You’re Anna Chaloner’s daughter.’
Claire flinched as if she’d been struck a physical blow. Her face changed. And for the first time Kash thought: maybe she isn’t such a good actress after all. A real actress would have fronted it out, said he was being preposterous, screamed at him for breaking down her door and making bizarre accusations – but instead her expression had become rigid and her eyes were welling up and the wine glass she was still holding was shaking, spilling its last bright red drops over the snowy fluff of her dressing gown.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I went to see Anna Chaloner. I thought it had to be her. I’d let slip to Ange that Trenchard was conscious, that he might be able to communicate. Then I remembered Ange had been in contact with Anna Chaloner. What if she’d told her about Trenchard? And then I remembered from the inquest, Anna Chaloner had trained as a nurse. Who had a better motive? He killed her son. It all fitted.’ He shook his head. ‘And then I saw the photograph. Of you.’
‘You had no right, Kash . . . no right.’
‘How long have you known? That Anna Chaloner was your real mother?’
Claire opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out. Tears were flowing down her cheeks.
‘You’ve known for a while, haven’t you, Claire? You told me the clock was ticking, you wanted to find out who your mother was before it was too late. And you did. Or perhaps you’d already found out by then. You did your digging and you found her, didn’t you? Or maybe she found you. Maybe she found you and you met her once or twice and . . . then found out you had a brother too. A younger half-brother called Edmund. How many times did you meet him, Claire? Did you get to know him? Did you—’
‘I never met him, Kash. I didn’t meet him at all.’
‘No,’ said Kash, and realized that it was true. ‘You never did. You were denied the chance to ever know the only brother you had.’ And . . . how convenient, she must have thought. A nurse in the very same hospital where her little boy died. Where he needn’t have died, if only that selfish, heartless bastard Michael Trenchard had been doing the job he was paid to do, if he’d been there that night as duty demanded – instead of running private clinics and seeing a mistress or a girlfriend, or whatever he was doing. So whose idea was it, Claire? Hers, or yours?’
‘Kash, you’re wrong. Whatever it is you think I did, you’re—’
But he wasn’t listening, the pieces of the puzzle clicking together in his mind. ‘You had the motive. You had the means – the brains, the knowledge, the access to the drugs. You had the opportunity. It would be easy enough. You could have just killed him. But that wasn’t good enough, was it? Michael Trenchard had killed your brother – the brother you never knew you had until it was too late. A man like that shouldn’t just die. A man like that ought to be punished. So you concocted a plan to destroy his reputation and make the rest of his life a living hell. Well, it wasn’t hard to destroy his reputation, was it? Plenty of people were more than happy to come out of the woodwork and tell stories about him.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Some of them were even true. Then planting the gear from some Soho sex store in his locker, where it was sure to be found. The rest of it, though, what you did to him, that was more difficult. Much too difficult for Anna Chaloner to have done on her own. You on the other hand – a nurse with access to every nook and cranny of the Victory – maybe you could pull it off. And what you weren’t sure of, you could easily brush up on from a textbook.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘I know how smart you are. And you did a great job, Claire . . . except for one thing. He started to make a recovery. Not much, but enough to communicate. You knew – because I told you. And that is one thing that you couldn’t allow to happen.’
Claire had heard enough. She threw her glass to the floor where it shattered into a dozen pieces, and launched from the kitchen counter, bringing her hand back sharply to strike him once, twice, three times across the face.
Kash reeled backwards, just stopping himself from falling by grabbing the open cupboard door. Looking into her furious eyes, he had a feeling of curious detachment: so this was it – what she had done to Mr Trenchard she would do to him now, anything to cover up her crime, anything to protect her long lost mother.
But instead she remained still, her hands at her side, shaking. She was breathing hard, her nostrils flaring.
After a while the fire in her eyes burned down, leaving only cold ashes. ‘You can leave now, Kash. If you’re here in thirty seconds, by God, I’ll call the police.’
‘The police!’ Kash half laughed. He could taste the iron tang of blood where he had bitten his tongue. ‘So you can tell them how you stole the drugs? How you stole into Mr Trenchard’s office that night and made out you’d come to seduce him? How you left him there on the floor – and how even that wasn’t enough? The catheter, Claire. His fingers . . .’
Kash was trembling at the very thought of it. Claire. His Claire. Suddenly he wasn’t angry any more. His sense of outrage and betrayal had disappeared. There was just a vast, all-encompassing sadness, a black cloud slowly engulfing him.
‘Get out!’
Kash turned away but, before he reached the door, he came to a stop and said softly, ‘Aren’t you even going to deny it, Claire?’
