Tiffany went silent and closed her eyes, trance-like. Her breathing softened and the rapid gulps of oxygen she was inhaling when frightened were replaced by deeper, more considered intakes. Nobody spoke for over ten minutes until Tiffany’s eyelids flickered and she returned to the room. She looked in turn at the three retired people in her bedroom, each of them silently willing her to take a leap of faith.

  The simple truth was that Tiffany was exhausted, drained by the complications of existence. She was fifty-one years old and had spent the last decade keeping secrets, keeping herself to herself, protecting Paul, nursing Paul, losing friends, losing her will to live sometimes. Since the trial she had become steadily isolated and she hated it. Now, she only lived for Paul but, try as she might, for the last few years she had merely been able to observe as he incrementally deteriorated in every way. Her ageing shoulders could only bear so much weight. Tiffany had been on the verge of collapse for some time.

  Anna’s phone buzzed. A text from Chris. Paul’s reading was up to eighty-nine. ‘Your son is recovering well,’ she said. ‘That was a message from a friend of ours who is looking after him at my house. He was in a bad way but he’s strong and he’s slowly beginning to turn the corner.’

  Tiffany began to weep again, huge sobs of pent-up relief blended with residual fear. Again David wiped her face gently with the stockings.

  ‘If I tell you,’ she said feebly, ‘we’ll need protection because if we don’t get it they’ll fucking kill us all.’

  40

  ‘Are you okay, Dad?’ asked Lucinda Tinker. ‘I’m still on shift for another hour but the desk said I should phone you urgently.’

  Chris had called his youngest daughter on her mobile at 6am without success. She was either sleeping or working. He decided to assume the latter and called St Mary’s on the off-chance he was right, in the full knowledge that an early morning call from her father would almost certainly terrify the poor girl. But then he had work to do. And he required certain equipment to do it. ‘Absolutely fine, darling,’ he said, alarmingly brightly for someone who had been awake most of the night. ‘How’s your shift been?’

  At the other end of the line, Lucinda’s voice took on a tone of relief combined with mild irritation. ‘It’s a Friday night in A&E, Dad. You can imagine how it’s been. I’ve had to change my scrubs three times thanks to almost the full gamut of human excretions. No semen, thankfully, but the day is young. Is this a social call? If I’m brutally honest, the timing could be better.’

  Chris noted the faint note of annoyance but he’d make it up to her. ‘I need your help,’ he said. ‘If I send a strange old man in a taxi,’ he glanced at Martin and smiled mischievously; the cabbie blew a kiss back, ‘would you be able to acquire a few bits and bobs from the supply room, please? I’m looking after someone at the moment and they’re not in the best of health. Do you think that might be possible, Lulu?’

  The junior doctor sighed. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a group of four, obviously drunk young men in various states of undress, staggering uneasily through the waiting area. ‘It kinda depends on what stuff, Dad. Are we talking surgical gloves? Painkillers? Should be fine.’

  ‘You’re an angel, Lulu. I’ll need a PN bag, a couple of cannulae, a couple of bags of zero point nine per cent saline, a Medi-Port, some sani-cloth wipes…’

  ‘Dad!’ Lucinda was tired and, love her father though she did, this list of requirements would not only get her fired but also struck off by the General Medical Council and possibly even arrested. ‘I can’t get all that and just sneak it out of the door! And what on Earth do you need it for anyway? You’ve been retired for seven years, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I know, darling,’ Chris was turning up the charm, ‘but I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency.’ Lucinda was silent at the other end of the line. Chris decided to take a chance. ‘Who’s the consultant on duty at the moment? Can you ask them? Tell them it’s for me?’

  ‘It’s Duffy,’ said Lucinda with an audible shudder. ‘She hates me for reasons I don’t understand. If I took a biro out of the hospital she’d have me publicly flayed. Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Duffy? Frances Duffy?’

  ‘The very same.’ One of the drunken young men was now urinating into a plant pot.

  ‘Interesting.’ Chris had spent much of the previous twenty-four hours making on the spot calculations. Now it was time for possibly the most delicate. ‘Could you ask her to call me, please? She has my number. At least, she used to have it.’ Of course, she hasn’t needed or wanted to use it for almost ten years, he thought, but hopefully enough water had flowed under that particular derelict bridge. Lucinda said that she would do her best, in between the dozens of other draws on her time in the remaining hour of her shift.

  Twenty minutes later, Chris’s phone rang, the caller display showing FD. Here we go, he thought, inhaling deeply. Tin hat on. ‘Frances! How lovely to hear from you on this bright and sunny Saturday morning. How are you? It’s been ages.’

  ‘Doctor Tinker,’ said Frances Duffy with as much formality as she could summon for a man who had turned her life upside down during a passionate but brief fling in her late forties. ‘You are familiar, no doubt, with Marfan syndrome?’ Chris confirmed that, despite its rarity, he was aware of the inherited condition whose myriad symptoms included extra-long limbs. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll understand my curiosity at your attempt to obtain, from a junior doctor no less, a list of specialist medical equipment as long as a Marfan sufferer’s arm. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you were planning to treat a very sick patient with a TPN line.’

  Chris weighed his options. He could invent some complicated tale about a long-lost relative turning up on the doorstep in poor health and in need of intravenous nutrition, or he could tell the truth. During their torrid relationship, he remembered Frances Duffy had always appreciated straight talking. Plus, at least they had ended it on good terms, both realising that it was what it was – intense, crazy, furious, short. Like a hurricane passing over a small island. He decided to tell the truth. ‘Frances,’ he began, ‘what I’m about to tell you must stay strictly between us.’ Chris rattled through a basic overview of The Twelve and then a more detailed summary of the Justin Morris case and the general situation regarding Paul Storey. Frances Duffy listened with great interest until he had finished.

  There was a long pause during which Chris wondered whether Doctor Duffy had perhaps got bored and wandered off to do something more interesting like lancing an anal boil. ‘Doctor Tinker,’ she said finally, ‘do you recall my specialism in the fourth year of medical school?’ Chris admitted that he hadn’t retained that information. ‘It was during a conversation which took place between us in a king-size bed in Hampstead. I don’t blame you for forgetting. As I recall you were fairly worn out after what we’d done together. And you were getting on a bit. Anyway. My specialism was inner city malnutrition. Text me a list and your address and I’ll be over in an hour or so.’

  Chris ignored the dig at his age, breathed an enormous sigh of relief, thanked Frances and ended the call. According to Veronica, Paul’s oximeter reading had just crossed into the nineties. Chris pumped his fist, wincing slightly as his shoulder muscle dragged at the remnants of the old wound. ‘Still got it.’ He grinned and began texting his requirements.

  41

  Tiffany had pleaded to be fully untied before starting her story but, in the interests of caution, Monica had suggested that her legs would need to remain restrained but that her arms could be made more comfortable. Tiffany had argued that she wasn’t planning to run anywhere, largely because she had nowhere else to go and also she felt safer inside, despite her house currently containing three old people who had taken away her son and tied her to a bed using her own clothing. After a few minutes of negotiation, David had carefully untied one hand at a time and tied the two together. Anna wished she had a pair of hers and Chris’s handcuffs, unaware that they were already in use elsewhere.

  The codeine administered about an hour earlier had had a dramatic effect both on Tiffany’s headache and her mood. She’d even offered to make everyone teas and coffees although the consensus in the room was that Anna was probably best placed to sort refreshments.

  ‘He was a good boy,’ began Tiffany, her voice faltering as she spoke. ‘I know everyone says their kid is good as gold but Paul really was a lovely little boy. He was smart, funny. He used to help the elderly neighbours with their shopping and everything. His teachers used to say what a pleasure he was to teach. I couldn’t have been prouder. Then his dad left home when Paul was thirteen and everything changed.

  ‘He started hanging around with the wrong people. They used to come to the house all the time and drink beer and smoke, even though they were all underage. They liked it here because I had food in the cupboards and they just used to help themselves. I always got the impression that they saw Paul as an easy touch who just wanted to belong so he let them use our house whenever they wanted.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’ asked Monica as gently as she could.

  Tiffany’s head drooped. She managed to twist to the right and pick up her mug of coffee from a side table both-handed before taking a long slurp and replacing the mug uneasily back in its position. ‘I thought about it a couple of times but Paul said they’d just beat him up for being a grass so I never bothered. Then when he was seventeen, the people he was hanging around with started bringing knives into our house. I came home from work one day and two of them were stabbing my kitchen table. The marks are still there if you want to go and look. I mean, I know it’s not the best quality table. It was Matalan. But still, you don’t dig holes out of someone’s table with a knife.’ She frowned at the memory. ‘I chucked them out there and then, but later that evening they came back. Paul answered the door and he got a knife held to his throat. I was terrified but they just laughed and went on their way. It was a power thing to them.

  ‘After that I hoped Paul would find a way to edge himself away from this group of thugs but, if anything, his attachment seemed to grow stronger. Looking back, I realise that he was probably looking for male role models after his dad abandoned him but at the time I was working two jobs trying to pay the bills on my own and doing my best to make sure Paul was safe.

  ‘That November night, when the Morris boy was killed; that night will stay with me forever.’ There was a silence while Tiffany gathered her thoughts before continuing. ‘I wasn’t working that night so I was watching EastEnders and Paul said he was going out. He’d bought a new jacket with some money he’d got as a birthday present from his nan and he was really proud of it. I heard him leave at about a quarter to eight and I assumed he’d be at the pub and that meant he’d probably roll in drunk about midnight, on his own if I was lucky. Instead, I heard the door go at about ten past eight. I got up and went to check and it was Paul. He was shivering in just his T-shirt and he had the beginnings of a black eye.

  ‘I tried to give him a hug and ask what had happened and where he’d left his jacket but he shrugged me off and said he didn’t want to talk about it. Then he went to his room and I didn’t see him again that night. The next day, he didn’t get out of bed until lunchtime. His eye was quite swollen by then and I wanted to call for a doctor’s appointment but he said no. He didn’t want any more trouble. It was a Saturday so I only had the evening job that day, I was doing bar work on the high street. I got to the bar just before six and everyone was talking about a stabbing near my house. I hadn’t heard anything about it because I hadn’t seen the local news or anything, but immediately I had a little warning bell go off in my head, you know?

  ‘I got home around midnight and Paul was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal. I asked if he’d heard about the stabbing and he just threw his bowl of cereal against the wall and stormed upstairs. I tried to follow him but he just swore at me and then locked himself in his room. I tidied up the mess in the kitchen and went to bed, although it wasn’t easy to sleep with everything that was going on.’

  Anna asked if Tiffany would like a top-up of coffee. It was gradually getting light outside and there was the faint sound of birds in the cemetery drifting through the open window. Tiffany nodded. ‘Maybe more coffees all round, please, if there’s enough,’ said Monica.

  ‘If there isn’t, there’s a café down the road that opens at seven on a Saturday. Anyway, shall I carry on?’ Anna managed to scrape just enough coffee out of a jar of Nescafé for four mugs, although a lack of milk meant that two of them had to be black. Tiffany returned to her story.

  ‘I tried not to think about the Morris murder but I couldn’t help it. Everyone at work was talking about it and I found myself obsessing over little details in the paper just to reassure myself that it had nothing to do with Paul. Then, after a couple of weeks, the police turned up. Two detectives, both men. They sat at the kitchen table and spoke to Paul for about an hour. Naturally they took great interest in the knife marks on the table. There was a lot of talk about the jacket. It had been found almost burned to a crisp but the bit that had survived the fire had some blood specks on it. Paul said someone had nicked it from the pub when he was in the toilet. The detectives took him away for further questioning.’

  Tiffany started to cry again as painful memories flooded back. ‘The next day, one of the detectives came back. Detective McMullan.’ Monica flinched. ‘We sat in the living room and he told me that it was likely Paul would be charged over the Morris murder but, he said, he would be able to manage the case so that Paul would only get a manslaughter charge because there was no proof he dealt the fatal blow. He would get fifteen years in prison but if he showed remorse and behaved himself, he could be out in seven. I didn’t know what to think. I knew my Paul could never hurt anyone.

  ‘Then Detective McMullan said that if I agreed to Paul pleading guilty to manslaughter then some friends of his would make sure I got enough money that I never had to work again. He also said that if I didn’t co-operate then he couldn’t guarantee Paul’s safety in prison and he couldn’t guarantee my safety here. As threats go, it wasn’t the most subtle. He asked me to think about it but also warned me that if I told anyone then he’d make sure I never saw Paul alive again.’

  ‘I can see how that must have been frightening,’ said Anna, energised by black coffee.

  ‘I was fucking terrified,’ cried Tiffany. ‘I’d never had any dealings with the police before. All I cared about was making sure Paul was safe. If that meant him going to prison for a few years, I could deal with that. Of course, because of that jury, he never did time. He got a worse punishment. Imprisoned in his own house just getting worse and worse. And all I could do was watch because I knew that if I asked for help from the outside, I might lose him either to social services or worse.’

  42

  It was just after seven that Anna’s doorbell rang. ‘I’d better go,’ said Chris nervously. ‘Doctor Duffy can be,’ he searched for an acceptable description, ‘fiery.’ Paul’s oximeter reading was now a satisfying ninety-one and he was drifting in and out of consciousness.

  For the previous hour, Chris had been anxious about many things, notably how Frances Duffy would greet him, how precisely he should greet her, and possibly more importantly, how he was going to fully explain the presence of a severely malnourished young man in recovery from carbon monoxide poisoning in Anna’s guest room. Of course, the two of them had been perfectly civil to each other on the rare occasions their paths had crossed at drab medical conferences while Chris was still working, but the last time they had been together alone, both knowing it would be the last time, the sex had been volcanic. He could still recall the intensity of it almost a decade on.

  ‘Good morning, Frances.’ He beamed, opening the door to a striking brunette woman with pale skin and bright-blue eyes. She was carrying a well-stuffed doctor’s bag. ‘You’ve barely aged. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were somehow looking younger than when I last saw you. It’s nothing short of a medical miracle.’

  Frances Duffy smiled at the compliment and embraced Chris awkwardly. ‘Nice place you have here,’ she said politely, if a little frostily.

  ‘Oh, it’s not mine,’ flustered Chris, ‘it’s… a friend’s. We’re using it for convenience sake. With the patient. But I’ve been staying here too. Over the last few weeks.’ He didn’t want to explicitly advertise that Anna was his lover but equally he didn’t want Frances to get the wrong idea. Ten seconds into their reconnection and he was already feeling distinctly uneasy.

  Frances raised an eyebrow. ‘I understand,’ she said efficiently. ‘Show me the patient.’

  Chris led the senior consultant upstairs to the spare bedroom where he quickly introduced Thomas, Veronica, Martin and Terry, all of whom greeted the visitor with formal handshakes moderated by mild fear – Chris had given them all a succinct briefing during the previous hour, naturally omitting some of the more personal details. Frances’s attention meanwhile was drawn to Paul Storey and in particular the fluffy handcuffs attaching him to the bed.

  She placed her bag on the floor and stroked her chin. ‘You don’t change, do you, Chris?’ she mused.

  Chris blushed. ‘He was spasming and we needed to find a way to secure him for his own safety and these were the closest thing to hand.’

 

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