Once in bed, eyes tightly closed, she tried to calm herself, slow her own heartbeat, breathing in and out deeply and deliberately. The spinning sensation continued regardless, its rhythm now becoming disturbed, unpredictable, lurching her with dizzying speed first in one direction and then another. Bile flooded into her mouth and, in seconds, she was violently sick.
Eight hours later she was woken by the sound of a key in the lock, accompanied by a series of thuds as Quill pranced exuberantly around Ian, celebrating his release from his eccentric custodian and his return home.
Ian bent over her as if to plant a kiss on her cheek, but hesitated momentarily, taking in her pale face and exhausted eyes. Looking at him she mumbled something about a virulent sick bug at work, remembering to tell him to keep his distance in case he should catch it. At once he recoiled theatrically, taking a few steps back from the bed, and the loss of his presence by her side, fleeting as it had been, brought tears to her eyes. His joke was not funny. If she had caught HIV from the corpse then this might be the pattern for any future that they might share. The thought of losing him, of the closeness, the intimacy that they had so recently found, dismayed her, allowing a sob to escape. Any one of those alphabetical diseases, never mind death, could do that.
‘Christ, Alice,’ he said, surprised by her reaction. ‘What on earth’s the matter? I was just joking.’
‘Oh, just this sick bug thing…’ she replied, unable to say more. But however hard she tried, she could not halt the tears which continued to stream down her face, wetting the pillow and her hair on it.
‘Darling, it can’t just be that.’
Hearing the tenderness in his voice and the unfamiliar endearment, she sobbed again. He had never called her ‘darling’ before, and now joined the precious few she knew who meant the word. His concern undid her, crumbling her resolve so that when he repeated his question she told him the truth, managing a fairly clinical account of what had happened.
He listened, nodding occasionally, and then applied his mind to the problem. Doctor Zenabi had said he thought it improbable that she would catch anything, and he was the medical expert. He was the man they should trust and believe in. So she would not catch anything. But suppose, at the very worst, she had contracted HIV. Drugs were now available making the disease treatable, and its presence need make little difference to their lives. Couples all over the world lived with it. Also, he knew a few people with Hepatitis C and they appeared to lead completely normal lives too. He seemed so confident, so unperturbed, by her news that she began to wonder if it was, after all, so very serious. Perhaps she had been melodramatic, had overreacted. All might indeed, as he had predicted, be well; and they had faced the worst together and he had not run away.
With the subtlety of a practised butler, present but unobtrusive, he caused freshly laundered night clothes to appear, her jug of water was filled regularly and innocent enquiries from her parents were fended off. However, the lure of the studio proved as irresistible as ever, and once he returned from it clutching in his icy hands a sketch of Quill, done from memory, to appease her for his day-long absence. But when, early on Monday morning, the phone rang and Ahmed Zenabi broke the news that the victim’s blood had shown nothing, Ian jumped onto their bed and hugged her, laughing out loud and, she noted, every bit as relieved as she was herself.
With the car idling at a red light, Simon Oakley peeled the silver paper from around his packet of Polos, rested the now unstable column of sweets on the dashboard and put four of them into his mouth.
Alice did not like mints, but she watched with interest as he chewed them up methodically, then helped himself to another three, never offering one. And it seemed to her that some fundamental rule of hospitality or, perhaps, comradeship was being broken. After all, he did not know that she would have refused one had it been offered. He appeared, in his confectionary-crunching, simply unaware of her presence. Or, and worse yet, careless of it despite their proximity, like a stranger in a railway carriage. Alistair would not have done that, he would have offered her his last crisp, but then, they were friends. Unless it was cheese and onion, of course, or salt and vinegar or… She must try to get to know her new colleague.
‘Simon,’ she began, ‘who d’you think killed Isobel Wilson?’
‘Er…’ he swallowed his mouthful, ‘like a p… p… polo, Alice?’ Then he corrected himself, ‘No, no, of course, you don’t like mints.’
‘Quite right, but how on earth do you know that?’ she asked, disconcerted by his remark, blushing at the thought of her hasty judgement.
‘I don’t, really, but you did turn down the peppermints that Ruth was distributing in the office after the meeting.’
‘Well, thanks for the offer. Anyway, what do you think?’ An unusually observant colleague.
‘A disgruntled punter, maybe?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps, someone who needed her services but was r… r… revolted by his own need? Well, that it should be met in such a way? It would f… fit with the likely time of death Doctor Zenabi gave us. Some time between about 9.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m. That would be office hours for her.’
‘And a punter who just happened to be carrying a knife?’
‘Possibly. A gangland type? Or maybe a married man lured of the s… s… straight and narrow by one of them?’
‘Like a hungry, obese person is lured off the straight and narrow by a chocolate gateau, cake-slice at the ready, you mean?’
They turned right onto a short drive, leading from Claremont Park to ‘Jordan’, a grand villa built of red sandstone and with an immaculate Jaguar parked on its gravel sweep. Bill Keane led them into his drawing-room, coffee already laid out on a tray for visitors, and stood with his back to a flame-effect gas fire, warming his mustard-coloured corduroys on the faint heat it provided. If the Wilson killing did not focus police attention on the residents’ clean-up campaign, then nothing would. That was surely the silver lining from that particular cloud.
‘Yes,’ he said, handing back the photograph of Isobel Wilson to Alice, ‘I’ve come across her. I know most of them by sight, although not by name, you’ll appreciate. She always wears a baseball cap, usually hangs about with another girl.’
‘Did you see her on Tuesday night?’ Alice asked.
‘No. We went out, straight after work, and had an early supper in the Grassmarket and then walked on to a concert at the Festival Theatre.’
‘What time did you get home?’
‘I can’t be sure, I’d guess maybe half eleven or later. After the performance we went on to the Dome for a drink.’
The door opened and a solid, middle-aged woman, spectacles suspended on a chain and bouncing off her pneumatic bosom as she walked, marched into the room bearing a large plate covered in shortbread pieces. Don’t take one, Alice willed Simon, looking at her own empty coffee cup and watching him drain the dregs from his own. She knew a trap when she saw one.
‘Yes, do take more than one, constable,’ Audrey Keane said acidly, watching with a fixed smile as the sergeant removed the two largest slabs, resting one on his saucer and starting to eat the other immediately, releasing showers of sugar to fall onto the deep pile of the beige carpet.