‘It’s fine — I’m fine. N-no need.’ She looked right and left, but the few remaining cars had vanished in the fog. It was just her and Andy the pirate, Andy the troll. ‘I just remembered — I’m meeting a friend at the Union Bar. Two friends. A whole bunch of people. They’re expecting me — they’ll be wondering where I am.’
He laughed. ‘Em-ma . . .’
Suddenly, her name on his lips sounded obscene. She tried to squeeze past him, but he seized her arm. ‘Next you’ll be trying to convince me they’ll send out a search party.’
‘Let go of me!’
Startled, he let his hand drop, and jammed it in his pocket. ‘I just wanted to give you a lift,’ he mumbled, staring at his feet. But he didn’t back off.
‘Sure,’ she said, trying to conjure up Vinnie’s sarcastic sneer. ‘Whatever.’
She edged past, but her foot somehow got tangled with his crutch and she fell headlong.
‘You okay?’ He was bending over her, his face full of concern. He took his hand from his pocket and Emma thought he was going to help her up. But she saw he was holding something. She heard a crackle and the fog seemed to flare blue-white for an instant. Ozone? Did she smell ozone?
Then he touched her neck lightly and her brain caught fire.
CHAPTER 6
The fog thickened as Palmer approached Karl Atherton’s house. His friend occupied the top floor of a tall, narrow, late-Victorian property, standing in its own grounds. The rest of the house was in darkness, but the windows of Karl Atherton’s top-floor flat were a milky blur through the fog, lit like a beacon to the weary traveller.
The flat was near Sefton Park, although the official area designation was Toxteth, which for many years had been synonymous with riots and looting. Palmer knew that Karl and Millie had bought the place at a time when national headlines frequently returned to the riots during the summer of 1981, when entire blocks were razed, destroying homes and family businesses and punching holes in the landscape.
Palmer knew that Atherton and his wife, Millie, had stuck it out through the rest of the grey eighties and the uneven recovery of the nineties, when the city’s regeneration was dependent on European hand-outs. Now the area, with its proximity to parks and the city centre, was a prime location for executives and professionals. And, twenty years on, Atherton was still fearless, though Palmer thought his optimism had been struck a blow by his wife’s death. Millie had been just sixty-eight, looking forward to a belated retirement, when she had her first attack. Gastric flu, they said, then gallstones. A week after that diagnosis she collapsed and was rushed into hospital where they performed a gastroscopy and found an inoperable tumour in her stomach. She died a few months later.
Cooking smells and the rising wail of an oboe wafted down from the kitchen like an invitation. Palmer mounted the stone steps and rang the bell.
He heard Atherton’s voice from above. ‘Come on up, the door’s open.’
Palmer felt his way blindly around to the side of the house where a glossy fire escape scaled the wall, disappearing into the mist like a stairway into the clouds. The iron was damp to touch and freezing cold, even through his gloves. He reached the top breathing easily and stepped into the steamy heat of the kitchen. Pots bubbled on the stove and Palmer’s host turned to greet him, a pan in his hand, sauce dripping from a spoon back into the pot.
Atherton was small, compact, his hair still sandy-fair despite his years. He wore a white shirt and maroon tie, with a maroon cardigan that Palmer recalled was a present from Millie for his last birthday. A tea towel was tucked into his belt as an improvised apron.
‘It’s an invitation to a burglar, leaving your door open like this,’ Palmer chided, knowing he sounded fussy and overprotective.
‘At my great age, you mean?’ Atherton’s mouth twitched in amusement. ‘The old fire escape rings out louder than any burglar alarm.’
He stood with his feet neatly together and his head cocked to the side, a quizzical look on his face. ‘I take it you left your mobile at home.’
‘Mm,’ Palmer said, refusing to fall into the trap of saying he had ‘forgotten’ it. Like many of their profession, Dr Atherton believed that forgetting had unconscious motivations. Palmer’s wife, Elspeth, had cited his ‘unavailability’ as one of his major vices, and though he hated to admit it, she had a point: walking was his thinking time and he could not think if he anticipated the despotic interruptions of his mobile phone.
‘I wanted to remind you that you undertook to provide the wine,’ Atherton said, turning back to the stove. ‘And since you walked here, it seems unfair to send you out again.’
Palmer narrowed his eyes; Karl enjoyed his Sherlockian challenges of deduction. He glanced down at his overcoat; a beading of moisture glowed opalescent in the kitchen downlights. ‘The condensation on my overcoat,’ he said. ‘The moisture in my hair.’
Atherton smiled. ‘Such perspicacity, and yet still we have no wine.’
‘White or red?’ Palmer asked, extracting one of each from his coat pockets.
He saw the slight wince at the generic terms — for Atherton, wine was known by region, grape, appellation, vintage — but his friend’s face brightened when he saw the labels.
‘The wine merchant was very helpful,’ Palmer said.
Atherton took the red between right index finger and thumb, supporting the base in the palm of his left hand with as much tenderness as a father holding his newborn child. ‘This will take a week to recover from the jostling you’ve given it,’ he said with deep regret. ‘Good wine should not be treated like cough medicine, Alan.’ He set it to one side and accepted the white. ‘Sauvignon — not a bad choice. And at the perfect drinking temperature. Shall we?’
Over dinner, they talked of Dr Atherton’s planned lecture tour of America in the summer, and of Alan Palmer’s marital problems.
‘I’m still seeing Lucy on Thursday afternoons and alternate Saturdays,’ Palmer said. ‘We’ve already split the proceeds on the sale of the house.’
There had been no question of either one of them keeping the family home: after the events of late spring, they would not want their daughter to be faced with the prospect of entering it ever again.
‘And Lucy,’ Atherton asked. ‘How is she?’
Palmer put down his knife and fork, suddenly sick. He forced the memory away, focused instead on the question. ‘I don’t know, Karl. She still has nightmares.’ The image pushed back, searing, like a camera flash at the back of his eyes. He drew a hand across his forehead, and it came away damp.
‘She’s young, Alan,’ Atherton said kindly. ‘The memory will fade. And she has the support of two intelligent and vigilant parents.’
Not quite vigilant enough, Palmer thought.
Atherton squeezed his forearm. ‘She’ll be fine.’
Absurd, but these words from his former teacher did more to reassure Palmer than all his own rationalisation.
* * *
They turned to professional matters over coffee and brandy, seated in Atherton’s library. The room took up a full third of the apartment’s floor space — thirty feet by twenty of built-in bookshelves. It housed Atherton’s collection of psychiatric texts, Millie’s historical reference books, and a fiction section that encompassed British and American classics, a sizeable crime collection and a few science fiction and fantasy novels.