“I should get back inside,” Paul told Yvette as a cold wind blew through the hospital car park, and he felt himself swaying under the crush of too many memories. “Get home.”
Even as he allowed Nathalie back into his head, made her solid again, Steph and Freya gripped hold of him, calling him back to London. He couldn’t even give Nathalie the dubious honor of being the love of his life. She was a wound in the corner of his heart while his wife and daughter had the rest, always would, and what he wanted more than anything was another chance to tell them so.
If Daniel hadn’t taken Freya, who had? In Paul’s mind, by now, his past mistakes and present crisis were utterly entwined. But he had to face the possibility: Might this journey into his former life have been nothing but a devastating waste of time?
Yvette slipped her arm through his and risked accompanying him back across the car park. The buzz of evening visiting time was building around the hospital grounds, a smell of mass-cooked food drifting from the upper wards.
Paul’s eye was drawn by a large black car parked at the entrance to his block. Something about its mirrored windows woke his instincts, just when he thought they’d been killed off again. He was almost unsurprised when the door opened and Tom Glover climbed out.
“Hello, you two.” He greeted them with a blank face. “Yvette. Fancy seeing you here.” He threw her a stony, meaningful stare. “Mind if I borrow Paul?”
Yvette looked at Paul. Her eyes flashed concern but he gave a small nod.
“DS Nicholls can give you a lift back to work,” Glover said pointedly, gesturing at the car.
“No,” Yvette said. “I’m fine.”
She glanced once more at Paul before releasing his arm and finally walking away.
Paul didn’t want to get into the car with Glover. Instead they walked in slow laps around the outskirts of the hospital grounds, passing smokers in wheelchairs and patients dragging their drips. His former boss was pretending he’d come to check how Paul was doing, but it was clear there was another agenda.
“Why don’t you spit it out, Tom?”
Something complicated crossed Glover’s face. He stared at a pair of doves that had found their way onto the site and were nesting on top of a Hospital Hopper bus stop.
“I’ve smoothed everything over with Nottinghamshire police. It never happened. You were never there.”
Paul stared at him. He didn’t know why he was so shocked. Glover had a talent for erasing things from the record. Paul should have been relieved, he knew. But this felt like one more thing he wouldn’t be held accountable for that would catch up with him one day.
“What the fuck were you playing at?” Glover asked.
“How did you know I was there?” Paul shot back.
“You think I don’t keep tabs on Sanderson even now? And you think I didn’t anticipate you’d go off on a fool’s mission? I didn’t think you’d be quite so foolish as to break into his house and stab him . . . If I’d got there an hour sooner I could’ve prevented it all.”
“You should’ve helped me when I first came to you.”
“For God’s sake, Paul! You know we can’t draw any attention back to that bloody disaster of a case. We’re going to have to buy Sanderson’s silence yet again—”
Paul’s head reared up. “He’s alive?”
“Well, yes. He’s recovering.” Glover jerked his head toward the hospital building. “He’ll stay away from you from now on. And you have to stay away from him. No exceptions.”
Daniel had survived. Paul blinked slowly, taking it in. His throat loosened as though someone had just removed their hands from around his neck.
“It’s essential we contain this,” Glover steamed on. “If the public ever finds out we sent in a UC to infiltrate that family, or that Nathalie Sanderson died because she was seduced by that UC, heads will roll. There’ll be a major inquiry. People will be incensed.”
“I don’t care anymore!” Paul’s shout made a passing porter look their way.
Glover stopped walking and turned Paul to face him. His spicy aftershave was still the same scent as years ago, with its bitter aniseed edge. “I’m thinking about the complications for you as well, Paul. I take it Steph still doesn’t know about Nathalie?”
“No.” Paul was aware of a collapsing sensation inside him, then a spark of defiance. “But maybe it’s time it was all out in the open.”
Glover’s mask of sympathy dissolved. Paul was reminded of that switch, on the day Glover had told him Nathalie was dead, that transformation from solemn deliverer of bad news to hard-faced guardian of the force’s reputation. Paul had been staying in a safe house at the time. After Nathalie had found out the truth, and gone running with it to her brother, Paul had called Glover and a backup team had rushed to pull him out. He’d been kept in hiding while things were brought under control. He still remembered the house’s plaster-dust scent, hard mattress, and the endlessness of his thoughts, punctuated only by visits from Glover. Daniel had got himself a lawyer and was threatening to sue the police. And there were “concerns” in high places about the way Paul had handled the operation. Concerns about his unethical sexual relationship with the suspect’s sister.
A few days later, Glover had arrived at the safe house unable to look Paul in the eye. Paul had thought he was going to tell him his career was over, which he’d assumed anyway. Perhaps, even, that Paul would be given another new identity for his own protection, and would have to move somewhere Daniel couldn’t find him.
But Glover told him that Nathalie had returned to the woods that had last seen her daughter, and added to their infamy by hanging herself deep within the trees. After he’d delivered the news, he’d seemed to lighten with the relief of having got the unpleasantness out of the way. Then he’d launched into his plan for “damage limitation.” He’d said it could easily blow up into a scandal, that Daniel was raging, lashing out, and would no doubt go public about the “misjudgments” that had led to his sister’s death unless they paid him off in a big way.
Paul had stared at his boss, wondering what kind of man he’d put his trust in. He’d imagined Nathalie thinking the same thing as she’d looked at Paul and realized he was a stranger, a faker, a person with an agenda. The fact of her death would not sink in straightaway. The guilt would come later, would cripple and change him, but in that moment all he’d felt was disgust, aimed at the man in front of him.
Disgust that was replicated now.
“I don’t think you mean that, Paul,” Glover said. “I don’t think you want the truth to come out any more than I do.”
The subtext was as clear as it had been back then: And I have the power to make sure.
But Paul had a new kind of power himself. The unhappy power of someone with little left to lose.
Glover adjusted his collar, eyes hard. “It would’ve made things easier if you’d let Sanderson bleed.”
Paul closed the space between them. “You’d have liked that. Another convenient death on somebody else’s conscience.”
He strode away, suppressing his limp until the hospital’s automatic doors breezed shut behind him.
The corridors had become crowded. The jostle of other people’s elbows and bags felt deliberate, personal. Paul could barely stop himself throwing out his arms and shoving blameless strangers out of his path. A roar of emotion was in danger of bursting from him, and a confession was crystallizing in his mind, a sort of statement about Daniel and Nathalie and Billie and everything.
Just as he reached the lifts, a hand grabbed his wrist. He twisted his arm in an instinctive self-defense move, but as he did so, he saw who’d seized him. Yvette kept hold, looking apologetic but determined.
“Yvette? Are you okay?”
She pulled him to one side, out of the current of people. “What did Glover say?”
“He wants me to keep quiet. Not cause any trouble. And he told me Daniel survived.”
“He did?” Yvette rubbed her lips together. “Jesus.” She seemed twitchy and pale, her eyes glassy.
“Yvette? What is it?”
She turned her head and stared into his face. Her fingers grasped his wrists. “I have to tell you something, Paul.”