Trust No One

Chapter 11

Liam was propped against the metal rail, staring at the open sea. ‘Look, if you like, we can just stop now.’

Some acid response was in her mouth, but she bit back the words. It wasn’t the moment. She was too tired. And, anyway, she didn’t know what he meant. Stop what? Stop walking? Stop everything?

Christ, this had been a mistake. In the end, she’d decided to come back home for the weekend. She’d hesitated initially, wondering if there was a risk that she might be followed. But she knew, rationally, that it was unlikely. It was one thing to follow someone for a few miles across a city centre. It was quite another to remain undetected across two hundred miles or more, particularly if your target knew you might be there. Even so, she’d driven cautiously, taking a convoluted route out to the motorway. stopping repeatedly at service stations on the way down. She’d taken the M25 round to the east, over the Dartford bridge, and entered London from the south-west, again choosing an extended route to confuse any pursuer. If anyone had managed to keep up with her through all that, well, good luck to them.

In any case, she thought ruefully as she turned into the narrow streets that surrounded their home, if there really was a mole back at the ranch, there’d be much easier ways of identifying her. It struck her now, as she pulled up in front of the familiar front door, that there was really nothing she could rely on. Nowhere that was safe.

Still, she’d been glad to come back here. It would give her some space, she thought, provide an opportunity to think. And if something was about to kick off, if there was any truth in what Jones had claimed, this took her out of the immediate firing line. Only for a day or two, but maybe enough to get her head straight.

But it hadn’t worked. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Coming back here had been a strain for months now. It was partly the sense that she was drifting away from all this, that real life was elsewhere. But it was also that she and Liam were both trying too hard to overcome the suspicion that the best was past.

There’d been a familiar emotional pattern to these weekends. She arrived late Friday night, and they spent a tense evening, each taking umbrage at whatever the other said, spoiling for a fight. Usually they went to the pub for a pint or two. Sometimes that helped. More often it didn’t.

By Saturday morning, they’d be at each other’s throats. They’d have a blazing row, releasing all the tensions that had built up over the last two or three weeks. After that, things improved till, by Sunday evening, they’d recaptured something of the old warmth. And then it was time for her to go back.

That had been the way even during the best times. It went with the job. She knew that. If you spent a long time apart, it took a while to get back together again.

After she met Jake, the weekend pattern became more intense. It was her own guilt, and her resentment about feeling guilty. It was the sense that she ought to be able to have things both ways, that this shouldn’t be a big deal, and the knowledge that of course it was. It was the awareness that she didn’t know what she wanted, and that she didn’t see why she should have to decide anyway.

But, mostly, it was Liam’s fault. It was Liam making unreasonable demands, even when he said nothing. Especially when he said nothing. She had work to do, real work, while Liam just sat down here, disapproving of whatever she did. Playing the victim, indulging the hobby he called a job, sponging off her.

None of that was fair or true, of course, and her rational mind knew it. But it was a convenient mindset to fall into on a miserable Saturday when she was feeling knackered, tense and depressed by everything the world kept throwing at her.

Even so, they’d managed to come through. Even the worst of the weekends usually ended with the realization that the sparse time was slipping away, that they did want and need each other, that – once the dust had settled – they still enjoyed each other’s company. Even in the last few months, she had warm memories of Sunday morning lovemaking, lunch in some country pub, a walk along the coast if the weather was half-decent.

But this weekend it wasn’t working. It was her own anxiety, the fears she couldn’t begin to share with Liam – or with anyone. But Liam was changing, too, she thought. He seemed distracted, a shadow of the lively fun-loving man she’d once fallen in love with. He’d always been prone to bouts of depression, sometimes intense, usually short-lived, and she could see signs of that now. It was the illness, obviously. But it was also his work, the dreams still not close to fulfilment, everything now in the balance.

And it was her. Her job, her absence, her refusal or inability to provide the emotional support he needed.

She wasn’t sure if his condition had deteriorated since she’d last seen him. It came and went – relapsing and remitting, they called it. Most days he was more or less fine. Some days he could barely walk.

Today, he seemed OK, just a little below his best. He walked slowly, leaning on a stick, with a barely discernible limp. Occasionally a grimace crossed his face, so briefly that she wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it. She suspected that he was learning to conceal the worst of his condition, and that he was feeling more pain, or at least more physical stress, than he was letting on.

Whatever the cause, they’d both been in a foul temper all weekend. Sunday morning had brought no lifting of the cloud, just further sniping and irritation. In an attempt to dissipate the fog of their mutual ill-feeling, they’d opted for a drive down to the south coast, some lunch overlooking the sea, a walk along the promenade. It was just another seaside town, reasonably accessible from their South London home, perhaps a bit more upmarket than most, but it had been one of their favourite places. Early in their relationship, before they’d moved in together, they’d spent regular weekends down here, getting to know each other, feeling their way around each other’s hearts, minds, bodies, creating memories that sustained them through the difficult later months.

Today hadn’t destroyed those memories, but they seemed increasingly distant. They’d had a mediocre lunch in an over-priced seafront restaurant where the waitress had seemed even more pissed off than they were. The town seemed stale and dull, and she struggled to remember why she’d ever liked the place, with its endless tacky souvenir shops and uninviting cafés. Even the walk along the promenade felt like a chore, Liam dragging slowly along, drizzle and cold winds pounding in from the leaden Channel.

Now Liam was hunched over the metal railing, staring out to sea as if contemplating a watery suicide, telling her that he just wanted to stop. Well, who could blame him?

She moved up behind him and tucked her arm in his. At first, he made no response, then, after a moment, he slid his arm around her waist.

‘Is this it, do you think?’ he said finally. ‘Are we finished?’

‘Christ, Liam, I’ve been a complete bitch,’ she said.

‘True enough,’ he agreed. ‘On the other hand, I’ve been a total arsehole.’

She laughed. The first time she’d laughed that weekend. ‘I won’t challenge that incisive piece of self-evaluation.’

‘What’s making us like this? Maybe we really do need to give it up now.’

She turned to look him in the face. ‘You keep saying that,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to think you might mean it.’

‘Don’t know what I mean. Don’t know what to think any more.’ He waved his stick vaguely in the air. ‘Not easy to get your mind around this. Makes it difficult to think about anything.’

She couldn’t argue with that. It was the worst thing about his illness – the absence of any clear prognosis. Years more of this, or something much worse. And that raised another question. About whether she was strong enough to cope with whatever the illness might throw at them. Whether, if it came to it, she was strong enough to be Liam’s carer.

‘You need to talk to the doctor again,’ she said, knowing that she was just trotting out the same meaningless mantra.

He turned and looked at her, then shook his head. ‘It’s not been a great day so far, but it won’t be improved if we get into that old argument again. You know there’s nothing she can say to me. I’ll go back when I need to, but I’m not clutching at straws.’

Again, she couldn’t argue. There were those who, faced with Liam’s condition, would pursue every possible solution. Second opinions, alternative remedies, any available form of quackery. There were those, too, who went into denial, pretended it wasn’t really happening to them.

Liam’s approach was different. Like most things in his life, he’d taken the diagnosis in his stride, simply accepting its reality. She remembered what he’d been like that first evening after his appointment with the neurologist. Shaken, and quieter than usual, but with the air of someone who’d perhaps received a larger-than-expected credit card bill or whose car had been damaged in some minor shunt. Not someone who’d just been given a potentially life-changing piece of news.

She’d felt guilty that day, too, because she’d allowed him to attend the appointment on his own. Her only excuse was that, typically, Liam had given her no real inkling of what was going on. He’d told her the full story only that evening. Hadn’t wanted to worry her unnecessarily, until he was sure. She suspected that, with feelings caught between shock, anger and guilt, she’d reacted less calmly than Liam himself had.

It wasn’t that Liam had been untroubled. In the weeks afterwards, he’d devoted himself to learning whatever he could about this baffling illness – borrowing books from the library, scouring the internet, sending off for leaflets from the MS Society. Mostly, he said, this mass of material just confirmed how little anyone knew – about the cause, the potential treatments, the likely prognosis. He’d confirmed to his own satisfaction that the limited medication he’d been prescribed was appropriate, and that, at least within the boundaries of conventional medicine, there was little else available. Liam had no time for alternative treatments. So that, as far as he was concerned, was largely that.

He was, or seemed to be, unfazed by the threat posed by the illness, but equally he harboured no false hopes. Maybe his condition would stabilize or even improve. Maybe it would continue to decline. Either way, other than the steps he was already taking, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

‘OK,’ she said now, moving herself closer beside him. ‘Your choice.’

‘My choice,’ he agreed. ‘You reckon we can still make this work?’

‘Probably,’ she said. ‘So long as we don’t expect it to be easy.’

‘It could be easier.’

‘If I gave up my job, you mean?’ The sea looked dark and threatening under the thunderous sky. The narrow beach was deserted, an occasional seagull shrieking in to gather some discarded remnant.

‘It’s not all or nothing. You could do something less demanding.’

‘Like what? Waitressing? Teaching? Prostitution?’ She was already pulling away from him.

‘No, for Christ’s sake, Marie, I’m not saying give up the job. I’m just saying you don’t have to be doing what you’re doing now. You’ve said yourself how demanding it is, that officers can burn out—’

‘You mean I can’t cope?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop this and listen. I’m not saying anything like that.’

She had turned away and was staring fixedly out to sea, but she knew that, if only for once, he was right.

‘What are you saying, then?’

‘I’m not trying to stop you doing anything. If this is what you want to do, fine by me. It’s not ideal but we can make it work. But you know you can’t do this forever. Even if you want to carry on, they’ll want to bring you back in from the field eventually.’

‘Before I go native?’

‘If you like. Christ, Marie, you’re the one who’s told me all this. I don’t know how it works. You do.’

She did. However good she might be at this job – and at times she didn’t know if she was any good at all – at some point, for whatever reason, they’d bring her back in. Quite probably that was what they were already planning. And quite possibly, if she took Morgan Jones seriously, it was what she needed.

‘Shit, Liam, I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I, and it’s not something we need to decide now. I’m just saying that things won’t be like this forever.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying we run with it for a bit.’ He laughed. ‘Let’s just try to be a bit less uptight, OK? Enjoy the time we do get together.’

She said nothing for a moment, her eyes fixed on the barely discernible horizon. Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside, she thought. She could remember a time when all this seemed to bring her to life, when she’d thought maybe they could come and live down here, find a way to make ends meet while Liam tried to make a go of his painting. She loved the tang of salt and ozone. The bite of the sea wind. The sense of being at the edge of things, with a world of possibilities out there.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘This was never going to be easy. We have to work with it for a while . . .’

She wasn’t sure what happened next. She was turning back towards Liam and he was moving closer to her when his legs slipped from under him. He toppled sideways, his face ashen, his mouth shaped to utter some words he never spoke. His wooden stick clattered under the metal railing, falling silently down to the sands below. And then Liam was falling, too, his head striking one of the iron posts, his body sliding awkwardly into the rails as he lost his footing.

She reached out instinctively and grabbed his thick woollen coat. His weight was too much for her and he dropped forwards, his head striking the post again.

She could see blood on his scalp, mingling with his wet hair, dripping down his forehead.

Her mind was already running through the possibilities, her eyes scanning the deserted promenade. She crouched over him, sheltering his head from the rain, fumbling for her mobile phone.

Christ, she thought, what had they done now?