Dark Winter

25

Saturday 10 May, 08:55 hrs

I’d got as far as the door when she called from the kitchen, ‘Remember what I said – keep the phone on, yeah?’ I had it half open when she appeared in the hall with a bowl of bran, her jaws working overtime. ‘Hope it all goes well – you know . . .’

I went down the stairs, checking my inside jacket pocket. My hand connected with the carrier-bag last night’s dinner had come in; it now contained ten packs of doxycycline.

I was going to leave the Mondeo where it was. The UK is the largest user of CCTV in the world. There’s so much coverage in London linked to numberplate-recognition technology that the Yes Man would know immediately where I was going and might even be waiting for me when I arrived. The addition of eight hundred congestion-charge cameras was the final nail in the coffin. Ken Livingstone kept saying that they’d wipe all information at the end of each day, and maybe they would – but not necessarily before they’d passed it on to the Firm, Special Branch and anyone else who wanted to know about our lives. Even on foot around here the fucking things could capture the average person on film at least once every five minutes. Many of the cameras were ‘smart CCTV’, combining video surveillance with facial-recognition technology, searching one million faceprints per second.

My own cell was turned off, but the moan-phone stayed on as promised. Because it was on secure, I knew it couldn’t be tracked – but I knew that wouldn’t stop them trying.

I took a taxi to Chelsea and spent the entire journey grappling with how best to break the news to Kelly. At the turn-off for the Moorings I realized I was most of an hour early, so got the driver to take me the few hundred yards back up the road to Sloane Square. I went into WH Smith and bought a Jiffy-bag, a Bic and a book of stamps. Sealing the antibiotics inside, I wandered down Kings Road to the post office. Addressed to myself care of Jimmy and Carmen, and with enough stamps on to get it to the South Pole, the Jiffy finally made its way through the appropriate hole in the wall.

There were still another forty-five minutes to kill, so I walked into Next and bought a pile of underwear, socks, sweatshirts and jeans. It must have been the quickest three hundred pounds they’d taken in a long time. My disposable life hadn’t changed much. I still didn’t own many things; I just used kit and then binned it, whether it was razor blades, toothbrushes or clothes. The apartment in Crystal City was bare, apart from three sets of sheets, towels and jeans: one clean, one on, and one in the wash. Well, that was the theory: it all depended on whether I’d get the machine repaired. The rest – a second pair of boots and some trainers, a couple of shirts, a few bits of crockery and a job lot of house stuff from a cable TV channel – I didn’t really need. It wasn’t as if I was entertaining every night. That was how I’d landed up buying it in the first place.

I got to the Moorings on time but the others hadn’t arrived. The receptionist hadn’t received any calls to say they were going to be late so I called the bungalow from her phone, but all I got was the BT messaging service. Carmen was always fucking up answering-machines by pressing the wrong buttons. Letting BT take care of it made much more sense.

Dr Hughes came into the waiting room with a smile on her face that made me think she’d been expecting Kelly rather than me.

‘Her grandparents are bringing her.’ I smiled back. ‘Maybe they’re caught in the traffic.’

She nodded. ‘No matter, we’ll just sit and wait awhile, shall we? What would you say to a cup of tea? Catherine, could you organize that for us?’

No wonder Kelly felt safe with her. She might have stern hair, but there was something about her, some kind of soothing aura, that made it impossible not to relax in her company.

‘Dr Hughes, I need to have a word with you. I’m afraid things have changed.’

‘By all means, Mr Stone. Do sit down.’

We sat at either side of the coffee-table, her half-moons nearly falling off the end of her nose as she gave me her full attention.

‘Kelly will be going back to the US tomorrow, so unfortunately this is going to be the last time she can come.’

Her expression didn’t change, but I heard the concern in her voice. ‘Are you sure that’s wise? She still has a—’

I cut in with a shake of the head. ‘I’ll be quite happy to pay for what time we have booked and anything else I owe you. I really do appreciate all you’ve done for us, in the past and, of course, now, and I’d be very grateful if you would still recommend someone to help sort things out for her in the States.’

She seemed to know it was pointless taking the conversation further. ‘Very well, Mr Stone, I understand. Your work again, I presume?’ The tone was sympathetic, not accusing.

I nodded. We’d been through a lot together, Dr Hughes and me. Three years and tens of thousands of pounds ago, I’d turned up at her clinic with Kelly in pieces. She was like a big bucket with holes – everything was going in, but then it just dripped out again. At boarding-school, before she went to live with Josh, she started to complain about ‘pains’, but could never be more specific or explain exactly where they were. It slowly got worse, Kelly gradually withdrawing from her friends, her teachers, her grandparents, me. She wouldn’t talk or play any more; she just watched TV, sat in a sulk, or sobbed. My usual response had been to go and get ice cream. I knew that wasn’t the answer, but I didn’t know what was.

One particular night, in Norfolk, she’d been particularly distant and detached, and nothing I did seemed to engage her. I felt like a schoolkid jumping around a fight in the playground, not really knowing what to do: join in, stop it or just run away. That was when I nailed the tent down in her room and we played camping. She woke much later with terrible nightmares. Her screaming lasted until dawn. I tried to calm her, but she just lashed out at me as if she was having a fit. The next morning, I made a few phone calls, and found out there was a six-month waiting list for an NHS appointment, and even then I’d be lucky if it helped. I made more calls and took her to see Dr Hughes the same afternoon.

I’d had some understanding of Kelly’s condition, but only some. I knew men who’d suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder, but they were big boys who’d been to war. Hughes told me it was natural for a child to go through a grieving process after a loss – but sometimes, after a sudden traumatic event, the feelings could surface weeks, months or even years later. This delayed reaction was PTSD, and the symptoms were similar to those associated with depression and anxiety: emotional numbness, feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and despair, and reliving the traumatic experience in nightmares – exactly what had happened to me at Hunting Bear Path.

Hughes’s diagnosis rang so true, but then, as I was to discover, just about everything she ever said rang true. Kelly hadn’t fully recovered from the events of 1997, and I didn’t know whether she ever would. Seeing your whole family head-jobbed took some recovering from. But she was a fighter, just like her dad had been, and had made dramatic strides. Under Hughes’s care, she’d moved from being a curled-up bundle of nothing to being able to function in the big bad world. It was just a fucker that that world was full of sex, exams, boys and drugs, all conspiring to send her back down the black hole it had taken her so long to escape from.