fifty-five

“In God’s name, where did you get it?” Why? should have been my first question, but I wasn’t thinking with enough lucidity.

“A friend of Steven’s.”

“Jesus, what kind of company did he keep?” A nice enough man, Colin had said. Yeah. Right.

“It wasn’t like that, Kim,” she said, touchy.

“Then what was it like? You do realise, don’t you, that it was loaded? What the hell were you planning to do, shoot your husband?”

“It was my insurance policy in case things turned nasty.”

I had a surreal image of my parents with pistols at dawn. “You would have shot him?” I was astounded.

Her eyes flashed with anger. “Don’t be silly, of course not. I wanted to frighten him.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Don’t ever call me that.” She yelled so loud, a couple on the next-door table spun round.

I glanced across with an expression of apology. Her eyes bulged wide, wild and ugly. Astonished by how undone she seemed, I lowered my voice. “You must understand how this looks.”

When she spoke next each word spat out of her mouth. “I was young. I was scared. I already told you. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.”

“Spare me the homilies,” I said. “This isn’t about a power struggle. You possessed an illegal firearm. How the hell was that supposed to end?” She looked at me with unadulterated truculence. I felt as if someone had spirited me back into my own consulting room. “Did you actually know how to use it?”

“Of course not.”

“Dear God, if the police get hold of this—”

“Which they won’t.”

Unless I tell them were the unspoken words between us. The similarity between my threat to Paris and now to Monica was not lost on me. What they called leverage; I intended to use it to obtain exactly what I wanted from both of them.

Monica viewed me with undisguised anger borne out of fear. Her plan to get me onside by showing how frightened she was of my father had backfired in the wake of the judge’s murder. If the police found out, she’d go straight to number one on the suspect list, and I couldn’t blame them. She was hovering pretty close to what I regarded as my personal number one spot, too. I strived for a more moderate approach. “What exactly happened in London?”

“I already told you.”

“You told me what you wanted me to believe. There’s a difference.”

She snatched at her drink like it tasted of malt vinegar. I persisted. “Something went wrong. What?”

Pinpricks of colour spotted her cheeks. Her eyes watered. The tic was back with a vengeance. “I can’t,” she said, breathing hard, her chest rising and falling. “I simply can’t.”

“All right,” I said, cooling things down. “Request a copy of your medical records from your doctor.”

“Why?”

“So I can read them.”

“It’s confidential information,” she blustered with alarm.

“It is.”

“You don’t have the right.”

“I don’t.”

“Then …” her voice drifted.

“Either you tell me, or I’m going to find out, with or without your permission.” I was bluffing, but Monica didn’t know me well enough to know that.

I watched as she processed her options. She looked ready to go silent on me, but finally, cold and grim, she said. “All right, but let’s have another drink, first.”

I sat in frozen silence while Monica ordered. Neither of us said a word until we had fresh glasses. She took a big swallow and stooped forwards so that she could keep her voice down.

“I became homeless and desperate and ended up in a hostel.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“It’s sad and I’m very sorry, but you once told me that I’d hate you for whatever it is you’ve done. Becoming homeless isn’t a sin.”

She took another drink. We both did. Dutch courage. “I lost the plot,” she began haltingly. “I slipped through the cracks in the pavement and plummeted into the abyss beneath.”

Darkness stirred inside me. “How exactly?”

“I wound up in hospital, a mental institution.”

“You were sectioned?”

I knew the steps and the strategy. Either a court detained an individual after a crime was committed, or there was what was known as a civil section whereby an individual was detained for his or her own protection, or the protection of others. The latter involved medics, three of which had to be in agreement that detention was the right course of action. A nearest relative was often consulted but, in Monica’s case, there was nobody.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Her cheeks sagged. She looked utterly dismal and lost. My heart momentarily swelled for her.

“What were the grounds for your committal?”

“The first time I was a danger to myself; the second”—she paused, stumbling over her own words—“I was considered a danger to others.”

We looked at each other, the truth sharp and pointy between us. “Tell me about the first time.”

“What’s there to tell?” she said, gloomy and sad. “I went into a slow, steady decline after Steven’s death. I couldn’t find work because I wasn’t functioning properly. It’s a kind of horrible catch-22. I had very little money. I couldn’t afford to feed myself or put a roof over my head. For a short period of my life, I ended up sleeping rough. Nobody gets a job when you’re in that state. I reached the stage when I couldn’t make a simple decision.” It was something with which I could identify. I remembered how I’d become following Chris’s death. Mentally mangled.

“How long were you detained?”

“Six months the first time.”

“And the second?”

“Almost two years.”

I blanched.

“It wasn’t great,” she said, picking up on my unease. “They said I had a severe anxiety disorder. I remember feeling paranoid about everyone and everything.”

“Paranoid enough to hurt someone?”

She hung her head. “A man who didn’t press charges.”

I bit down to prevent myself from gagging.

“Luckily for me, he was a lay preacher, believed in the power of forgiveness.” She looked up. “But if the police ever get hold of that,” she said, “I’m done for.”