Sarah Leonard watching him, Carew was off down the street, not exactly hurrying but gradually lengthening his stride, stepping out, showing his paces.
Forty-four
“Where’s Calvin?”
Resnick looked up from changing the tape. “He’s being questioned by detectives.”
“About me?”
“Not directly, no.”
“I want to see him.”
“Afterwards.”
“After what?”
Resnick pressed record and pause simultaneously. “I think what you were about to tell us was to do with the legal action, why you didn’t proceed.”
Sarah Leonard’s blue uniform hung down from the handle of the bathroom door, ballpoint pens poking from the breast pockets, one side weighed down by a stethoscope, a notebook, her watch still pinned to the front, beneath her badge.
Sarah knelt in the bath, running the water from the mixer shower over her face and hair. She was thinking about Tim Fletcher, how easy he was to talk to, how she might have found him attractive if only he were a little taller. God! Sarah laughed up into the spray of water. If only for Ian Carew’s body, Tim Fletcher’s personality, his mind. She closed her eyes tight and brought the shower rose closer to her face.
“You can’t tell me that man did what he did through anything other than guilt. It had already happened when he was in charge of those machines one time before. And he’d been proved guilty for it. Why else pay all that money out of court? He knew, Imrie, he knew that was his responsibility, same as what happened to me, and he couldn’t live with it no better than I could. Except he didn’t actually know the pain, he didn’t feel the pain, he just knew he caused it and that’s why he swallowed all them pills and then took a razor to his wrists on account he didn’t want to take any more chances. Risk something going wrong, not when it was his own life he was dealing with. No.”
Ridgemount dampened his bottom lip with his tongue; Resnick signaled to Patel, who poured some more water and left it within reach of Ridgemount’s right hand.
“I thought that was some kind of sign. I thought that meant that man had accepted all the blame to himself and now it was going to be over. Except the dreams never left me and I could never get back to sleeping normal like anyone else and all that did leave me was my wife and my little girl. So I knew …” looking at Resnick, searching his face, “I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I knew there had to be something more.
“See, it would have been better if they had killed me, there on that operating table, if they had killed me dead, ’cause what I was, what I had become, that was worse than being dead. But God had left me alive and I had to find a way of dealing with that and I knew I couldn’t turn round and do what that man had done and take my own life, not after God had sent me through that fire and brought me out on the other side.”
“I thought, they are all at fault. What they got to do is accept their blame.”
“And I waited and meantime the pains in my head got worse and still they done nothing, so little by little I took it on myself to find out where they were, what they were doing, and they were all, most of them, carrying right on like before as if nothing had ever took place. And I kept watching them, them who’d been in there with me during my operation, I watched them and I waited for something to tell me what I could do that might finally ease my pain.”
“Me and Calvin, we lived our life best we could and all the while I was waiting for some kind of sign.”
Sarah watched the pan, waiting until the boiling milk had bubbled almost to the rim before whisking it off the gas and pouring it into the mug, spooning in three heaped teaspoonfuls of hot chocolate and stirring hard. On the way over to the sink she licked the pieces of dark chocolate away from the spoon before dropping it into the bowl. She collected her book and carried book and chocolate up towards the bedroom. She was just settling into bed, wondering if she might get to the end of her chapter before falling asleep when she heard the glass break.
Her first thought, as she sat up in bed, it was someone on the way home from the pub, kids coming out of the Marcus Garvey Center; once before a neighbor across the street had a brick thrown through her window, some people’s idea of fun.
But this had not been at the front, the sound had come from the back.
Sarah stood at the door to the bedroom, eased the door open and held her breath. Nothing moved below: no light save that from the street which filtered through the front room curtains and the pebbled glass above the front door.
Still she waited.
It need not have been her house at all, it could as easily have been next door. It could have been someone throwing stones from the field. If it had been a burglar, it was possible she had already frightened him off; or he could be down there, waiting. For what? Part of her wanted to turn round and get back into bed, pull the covers up over her head. Whatever she had downstairs that was worth taking, let him take it. Not for the first time, she cursed herself for not having a phone point put in the bedroom. Even so, surely that’s what she should do, go downstairs and telephone the police.
“What they all still had”-sweat was beading along Ridgemount’s lip, running into the corners of his eyes and making them sting-“was their liberty to do as they chose, have affairs with other women, other men, go off and study, anything they liked and I was trapped by what had happened to me and what had happened to me was their fault.
“So I watched that nurse, the way he would come on laughing and joking all the time with the other nurses and patients, always letting on like there was never a care in the world. No, you’re fine, nothing’s going to happen to you. Nothing’s going to go wrong, you take my word for it, you trust me, this operation’s going to be the best thing ever happened to you, put another ten years on your active life.”
“And that young woman, the one whose job it was to make sure that anesthetic machine’s working right, she’s up to the university making out she’s so smart and clever, going to get herself a degree and everything, thinks she’s so wonderful, couldn’t see the machine going wrong.”
“All of them, what I wanted, what I was waiting for, a way to take their liberty away without taking a life, ’cause the taking of a life, that’s wrong. That don’t help anything.”
“How about Amanda Hooson?” Resnick asked. “What about her life?”
“Now that,” Ridgemount said, looking straight at him, “that was never meant to happen. I never knew anyone could struggle so. That was a mistake.”
“Sarah!”
The second she heard the voice, she knew whose it was and she rocked sideways against the door, a single low breath expelled from her mouth.
“Shall I come up to you or are you coming down to me?” He was leaning against the wall between the front door and the foot of the stairs. In the faint light she could see only his face at all clearly and as she got closer she saw that he was no longer wearing the same clothes as before, but black jeans and a black cotton sweater. Hands in his pockets as he leaned there, nonchalant.
“You see,” he smiled, “I said it wasn’t over.”
“What? What isn’t over? What?”
He came towards her and she backed up the stairs, four or five treads, before thinking this is the last thing I have to do, show him I’m afraid. So she went back down, didn’t stop until she was face to face with him, more of a sneer than a smile at the corner of his mouth, she could see that now.
“What do you want?”
Before she could react, he grabbed the front of her dressing gown and pulled hard, throwing her off balance, hard into him. She pushed herself clear, one hand clawing for his face, but he only laughed and pulled again twice with the hand that had never let go and her dressing gown was wide open, the shirt that she wore in bed with its buttons torn away.