Die of Shame Page 12

  ‘Thank you,’ Tanner said.

  ‘You’re very… honest,’ Chall said.

  ‘I don’t lie. Not any more.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Not about anything important.’

  ‘What time did Amber leave?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘She was there about an hour,’ Joffe said. ‘And that included dinner.’

  Tanner stared at him.

  ‘Joke,’ Joffe said. ‘Seriously… I paid for an hour, but it didn’t take that long. She probably left just before ten o’clock.’ He watched Tanner writing in her notebook. ‘It’s become something of a habit, to tell you the truth. At the sessions with Tony I get certain things off my chest and afterwards I feel I need a different kind of… relief.’ He looked at Chall. ‘Routine is important when you’re in recovery.’

  ‘I hope the agency gives you some kind of discount,’ Chall said.

  Joffe smiled and looked back to Tanner.

  ‘Do you remember what happened at that final session?’ she asked. ‘What people got off their chests?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Joffe said.

  ‘Anything that might be significant? You know, looking back on it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not really comfortable talking about what went on in any specific session. That’s the only rule we have. It would be a betrayal.’

  Tanner was not surprised. ‘What happened to wanting to do whatever you could to help?’

  Joffe took a few seconds. He straightened the creases in his dark trousers. ‘I’m sure you’ll get the same response from the others.’ He glanced at Tanner. ‘May I ask who else you’ve spoken to?’

  ‘We’ve already interviewed Christopher Clemence.’ She saw the doctor’s reaction. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say that Chris and I don’t exactly see eye to eye a lot of the time. It would be fair to say that, when it comes to the process of recovery, how we approach it, we’re very much at either end of the “spectrum”.’

  ‘Chalk and cheese,’ Chall said.

  ‘One way of putting it.’

  ‘And where was Heather, would you say?’ Tanner asked. ‘On this “spectrum”.’

  Joffe thought about it. ‘She was the peacemaker, quite often. I mean she didn’t take any crap and if she thought someone was in the wrong about something she would speak up, but most of the time I think Heather just wanted everyone to get on. Impossible, obviously.’

  Tanner was still writing when the old woman with the dog got up from the adjacent bench and moved towards them. Her dog, a scruffy-looking terrier, stopped and began sniffing at Tanner’s feet. When it began jumping and pawing at her shins, Tanner quickly raised her hands out of reach of the dog’s face, held them up next to her own.

  The old woman said, ‘Come on,’ and pulled the terrier away.

  ‘Are you afraid of dogs?’ Joffe asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s quite common.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘I know a hypnotherapist who might be able to help.’ He took his phone from his inside pocket and began scrolling as he spoke. ‘This chap’s excellent, really. He works with smokers, people with phobias, over-eaters. Actually, I recommended him to someone in the group.’

  Tanner raised a hand. ‘Thank you, but there’s really no need.’ She waited, then watched Joffe slip his phone back into his pocket. ‘Now, if you aren’t willing to talk in specifics about the group —’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can you give us some idea of the kind of thing that went on? What a typical session might be like. It would be a big help.’

  Joffe nodded. ‘Well, the simple answer is that there’s no such thing as a typical session. I’ve been in plenty of groups —’

  ‘I’m only interested in the group that you and Heather were in. The Monday evening group with Mr De Silva.’

  Joffe shrugged. ‘Same thing applies,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it was an hour and a half’s shouting match and sometimes we spent all our time laughing. It would depend on the make-up of the group that particular night, what mood everyone was in. It would only take one person to disrupt it, you know? To create a bad… vibe or whatever.’

  Tanner thanked him and made another note. ‘We’re keen to talk to everyone in the group and Mr De Silva has told us that if individual group members are OK with it they’re free to give us the names. As I said, so far we’ve only spoken to Mr Clemence.’

  ‘Right. Well, the only person whose full name I actually know is Diana Knight. We’ve had meals together a couple of times.’ He smiled and glanced at Chall. ‘Nothing like that, I should add. She lives in Barnet, so hopefully you’ll be able to track her down.’

  Tanner put her notebook away and lifted her bag up on to her lap. ‘What did you mean before? When you said about not being at your best ten years ago.’

  Joffe swept his hair back, straightened those trouser creases again. ‘Well, you know I’m a recovering addict, so I would have thought you could work that much out for yourselves.’

  ‘Alcohol?’ Tanner waited. ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Drugs, primarily.’

  For the first time since Tanner had clapped eyes on Robin Joffe, he was looking uncomfortable. She knew that the doctor did not have a criminal record, but now she thought she understood why he might be so reluctant to talk to police officers in his place of work.

  She said, ‘OK.’

  ‘Is it relevant?’

  ‘In the early stages of an investigation, it’s hard to say what is and isn’t relevant.’ Tanner stood up. Joffe and Chall quickly followed suit. ‘Clearly your support group was very important to Heather, so…’

  ‘Important to all of us,’ Joffe said.

  Handshakes were briskly exchanged for the second time. Tanner thought that Joffe’s palm was perhaps a little clammy, but the drizzle had been getting heavier and the bench might well have been damper than it looked.

  ‘I know you won’t be able to go into any details.’ Joffe shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘About what happened to Heather, I mean. But can you at least tell me if was quick? Did she suffer?’

  Tanner dragged the strap of her bag on to her shoulder and said, ‘Yes, I think she probably did.’

  The doctor muttered, ‘Thank you,’ but looked rather as though he wished he had never asked.

  They watched Robin Joffe walking away towards the hospital, his dark coat flapping behind him as he trudged back up the hill.

  ‘Want me to check out his alibi?’ Chall asked.

  ‘He hasn’t got an alibi,’ Tanner said. ‘His friend Amber had gone by ten and we know from the phone records that Heather Finlay was still alive at half past.’

  ‘What do you make of all that not lying stuff?’

  ‘Everyone lies,’ Tanner said. Simple, a matter of fact. ‘And even if everything he says is the truth, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things he’s choosing not to tell us.’ She turned round and stared at the fountain. ‘Call the escort agency anyway and see if you can talk to Amber, or whatever her name is.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And try not to get overexcited. If she says you’re special and that she really likes you, she’s definitely lying.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Chall said. He pointed at the floor. ‘You read any of her books?’

  Tanner looked down at Agatha Christie’s words carved into the shiny slab. She shook her head. The truth was that she’d barely read anything as a child, having been far more interested in rough and tumble with her two elder brothers. She didn’t read much now, and certainly not crime. There was a time when she and Susan might have watched an occasional crime drama on TV, but Susan’s tastes were distinctly cosy and Tanner had finally called a halt to the nonsense after seeing a victim on Midsomer Murders dispatched by a giant cheese.

  ‘The little grey cells,’ Chall said.

  ‘What?’ Tanner bent to pick up a crisp packet, caught in a sodden clump of fallen blosso
m.

  Chall tapped a finger against the side of his head and said it again, this time laying on the cod Belgian accent good and thick.

  Tanner straightened up and walked towards a litter bin. ‘I don’t think I’ve got enough of them,’ she said.

  … NOW

  At the door of the church hall in Belsize Park, Robin was greeted by a reticent young man with bad skin who mumbled a welcome, but could not make eye contact. It was perfectly normal and Robin guessed that the woman looking at the floor when she was not dispensing hot drinks from a sagging trestle table was feeling equally awkward. Those still in their first ninety days clean or uneasy with sharing would often be allocated service posts. It left them little option but to meet people, to make contact with those who had once been where they were now.

  Robin took care to say hello, to tell each of them they were doing a great job. The young man nodded and the woman’s nervous smile showed what few teeth she had left.

  As soon he had taken his tea and grabbed a handful of digestives, he went and sat down towards the back of the room. It was cold and overly lit. There were perhaps forty people scattered unevenly across seven or eight rows. There was a good deal of chair-scraping which echoed around the hall and a few fragments of whispered conversation, until a woman Robin recognised stood up from her chair at the front. As secretary of the meeting, she ran through the guidelines with which he was well familiar. Shares, she said, were to be confined to those matters relating to and affecting an individual’s recovery, and the twelve-step programme of Narcotics Anonymous. Everyone was to refrain from obscenity, abusive language and personal attacks and, in line with NA traditions, there was to be no expression of opinion on outside topics. Smiling, she confirmed that this was an open group, so Robin knew that not everyone present would be an addict. There might be the concerned parents of teenagers in attendance, or the odd Channel 4 documentary maker; friends there to lend moral support or simply those who were curious to see what went on. They were warmly welcomed, though all were required to identify themselves and none would be allowed to speak.

  The secretary then introduced the chosen chair for the evening and an older man stood up and said how happy he was to be there, to have the chance to share his strength and his hope. In a thin, reedy voice, he talked for twenty minutes about his own journey, choosing to focus on the first step, the most important, he said more than once, and the one which he had certainly found the toughest: the admission that he had been powerless, that his life had become unmanageable.

  Robin sat back and let the words sink in and soothe him, as such words always did.

  Now he had the power back.

  Now he could manage everything…

  He had looked up the meeting in the where-to-find booklet that was always in his pocket. It was one he had attended once or twice before, but not on this particular day of the week. Normally he went to meetings a little closer to home, but this had been an emergency and so he had sought out the venue nearest to the hospital. The place he could get to fastest as soon as his shift had ended.

  It was a long time since he had needed a meeting this badly.

  He could not remember feeling so discombobulated, so jumpy. A few hours before, walking back to the hospital after the meeting on South End Green, he had felt his chest pulsing beneath his coat and jacket, his heart rate elevated as much by the conversation as it was by the gradient.

  He still wondered how he had come across.

  It was hard to be yourself at the best of times, talking to police officers, all but impossible when that self was still… fractured; still in the process of putting itself back together. They knew how to throw people, of course; that was all part and parcel, wasn’t it? Tanner had been especially good at that, he thought and he supposed that female officers were generally better than their male counterparts when it came to the psychological stuff. He well remembered the tricks his ex-wife had played when the wheels had come off his marriage. The passive-aggressive stuff and the threats so subtle that he had half thought he was imagining them.

  You’ve worked so hard to get where you are. It would be a shame to throw all that away…

  He had tried to appear calm, back there on that bench, to gather his thoughts when he needed to and say only what was necessary. All fine and dandy until the end, when the woman had brought up his past. His own fault for mentioning it in the first place, but being happy with who he was now meant a blanket refusal to deny who he had once been.

  I don’t lie…

  Once the chair had finished, the secretary opened the meeting to the floor and the addicts began to speak up. They raised a hand and introduced themselves, were welcomed in that manner so parodied by sceptics and lazy comedy writers, then said whatever they had come to say.

  I’m twenty-three days clean.

  I want to get sober, but I’m scared of what I’ll be like.

  I don’t really know why I’m here. I don’t actually have a problem.

  Robin had heard variations on that one more times than he could remember.

  After hands had been joined and the serenity prayer spoken aloud, the meeting broke up and people began to drift towards the street, most lighting cigarettes the second they were out in the fresh air. There was a good deal of hugging and chatter. Some walked away together in twos and threes, while others loitered awkwardly near the door, as though hoping to be spoken to or invited elsewhere.

  The secretary laid a hand gently on Robin’s arm. ‘Not seen you here for a while,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everything OK?’

  Robin quickly assured her that everything was fine and said how much he had enjoyed the meeting. As soon as someone else joined the conversation he seized the chance to walk away.

  I don’t lie…

  His hands were shaking. He thrust them into the pockets of his overcoat as he hurried towards his car. As soon as he had closed the door of the Audi, he reached for his phone and began searching through his list of contacts. The very least he could do was call Diana and warn her that the police would soon be knocking on her door.

  It was only polite.

  Neither had felt like cooking, so they ate at a small Chinese place on Hammersmith Grove. It was walkable, as well as being a damn sight cheaper than somewhere in the West End, and – though Tanner had tired of pointing out that there was probably a very good reason – they could always get a table.

  Susan scattered slivers of spring onion into a pancake and reached for the last few pieces of the crispy duck they had been sharing. ‘Paul Murphy was back on form again today.’

  ‘Oh good. It’s been ages.’

  ‘Well, he was absent for a lot of the time.’

  ‘Oh. That’s a worry, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Never seen the staff room so happy.’

  Susan taught at a primary school in Chiswick and the boy in question had been the subject of many of her favourite stories over the past couple of years. Most of them were hilarious, or had at least become so in the telling, though Tanner was convinced that the boy’s often bizarre behaviour hinted at a home life that was anything but happy.

  ‘He exploded in the bogs,’ Susan said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, as good as.’ She took a bite of her pancake, and chewed fast, keen to tell the story. ‘So, nobody can find Paul after lunch. Everyone’s looking and they finally find him in the toilets and it’s like he’s… exploded. I’m not kidding; there’s shit everywhere.’

  Tanner grimaced. ‘Come on, Sue, not while we’re eating.’

  Susan grinned. ‘I swear, it was like a dirty protest. So we called his mum… have I told you about Paul’s mum?’

  ‘The one who looks like a boxer.’

  ‘A very bad boxer. Anyway, so she comes steaming in half an hour later and he’s still there sitting on the floor because nobody wants to try and clean him up… she marches into the toilets, takes one look at him and says, “Fuck’s sake,
Paul, I told you fourteen peaches was too many.”’

  Tanner thought how good it felt to laugh. She had enjoyed the occasional bit of banter with Dipak Chall and one or two others over the past few days, but there had not been much cause for hilarity, not like this. Susan could always do that. It was one of the reasons Tanner loved her partner so much.

  ‘Fourteen peaches!’ Susan said and they laughed some more.

  The waiter arrived to clear the starter away. When he had gathered up the plates and bowls he asked if they needed any more beers. Tanner said she was fine as she was, while Susan quickly downed the last of her Tsingtao and ordered another.

  ‘I was at South End Green today.’

  ‘At where?’

  Tanner explained where it was, told Susan about the fountain she had never noticed before and the quotations on the ground around it. ‘My murder case,’ she said. ‘The woman in Victoria.’

  ‘Did you read any of those books when you were a kid?’ Susan smiled as the waiter returned and put down her beer. ‘Murders in vicarages and what have you.’

  For the second time in one day, Tanner said that she didn’t.

  ‘I used to like the Secret Seven,’ Susan said. ‘The Famous Five and all that. I was always convinced that George was one of ours.’

  ‘I was talking to a doctor,’ Tanner said. ‘That’s why I was there. He was in a kind of support group with my victim.’

  ‘What kind of group?’

  ‘Just a general… therapy kind of thing.’ Despite the fact that the only other occupied table was on the other side of the restaurant, Tanner leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘He told me he’d been taking drugs while he was still performing operations.’

  Susan nodded, took a few pieces of cucumber. ‘High functioning,’ she said. ‘That’s what they call it.’ She took a swig of beer. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drugs. Never have. Couple of puffs of dope when I was in the sixth form and that was me done.’

  Tanner nodded. This wasn’t anything she didn’t know, hadn’t heard before, but it was fine. Two people who had been together as long as they had were bound to start repeating themselves. Sometimes it was probably because they had simply run out of things to say, but often it was about reintroducing themselves. Replanting a flag. Each reminding the other that they had an opinion on something other than whether the kettle needed descaling and whose turn it was to take the rubbish out; views about one issue or another that still counted for something.