However in the cold early hours Michelle woke with a start. Her head was no longer woozy. Her thoughts were suddenly crystal clear. She hadn’t been around the table with the others for long, but it had been long enough. The policewoman in her had picked up on something during that brief conversation, and now it was seriously troubling her.
As she went over it in her mind, she began to think again about what had happened to her. She had total recall, the events of that night still vivid in her mind. As she replayed the scene, re-examining each detail, a new train of thought was beginning to form. She found herself questioning whether it really had been Alfonso who’d attacked her.
Her eyes turned to the digital clock on her bedside table, its luminous numbers flickering slightly in the gloom. It was 2 a.m. She lay for a while, quite still, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Alfonso Bertorelli had been charged with Marlena’s murder and her assault because of the weight of evidence against him. That was what she had told the group around the table. The police don’t make mistakes with murder charges, she’d insisted. And most of the time that was true. But sometimes mistakes did occur. Could it be that this was one of those sometimes?
Greg had asked her whether she’d thought at the time that it was Alfonso who’d punched her in the face.
She hadn’t answered the question. The truth was, she didn’t have a clue.
Her head was buzzing. She should leave this to Vogel and his team. Michelle knew she was too involved. She was a victim. If you were a victim, you could not detach yourself. You couldn’t sift through the facts with anything like the required objectivity. The way Vogel always did. She trusted Vogel, didn’t she? No one was more meticulous than him, no one less likely to leap to conclusions. She had to trust Vogel.
Although she was so very wide awake Michelle still felt exhausted. She told herself she should try to get back to sleep. That if she could only sleep until dawn, things might straighten themselves out. Her doubts might resolve themselves without her doing anything about them.
She turned over on her side and shut her eyes. But sleep was not to come. Instead of the oblivion she craved, she lay in her bed tossing and turning, thoughts racing through her mind. After what seemed like a very long time, though it was actually only twenty minutes or so, she gave up. Sleep was not going to come, and there was nothing she could do about it, except perhaps repeat the previous day’s overgenerous doses of whisky and prescription drugs. But now that this idea had taken over her brain, she doubted that such measures would have any effect.
She climbed out of bed, wrapped a dressing gown around her shoulders, made herself tea in the little kitchen and took it to the window at the far end of her room, the one that overlooked Theobalds Road. She glanced at her watch. It was just gone three now. Still the middle of the night. But there was an intermittent flow of traffic on the street below her. Central London never sleeps. A couple of black cabs, one with its light on, rolled by. A motorist in a four-wheel drive sounded his horn at a cyclist who stuck two fingers up at the retreating vehicle and hollered some incomprehensible abuse.
Michelle’s nose was beginning to throb again. She wondered how long it would be before that throbbing began to ease. The numbing effects of the painkillers had totally worn off, and the pain was back with a vengeance. Aside from being distressing in its own right, the throbbing was a constant reminder of the sorry state of her face and the horrible reality of her injuries having been caused by someone she cared about.
She made her way into her tiny bathroom, removed the bottle of painkillers from the mirrored cabinet on the wall, and swallowed two of them, the correct dose this time, filling her tooth mug with tap water to wash them down.
She hoped they would do the job well enough, because she was determined not to deaden her brain for the second day in a row. She needed all her wits about her if she was going to make sense of the thoughts buzzing around inside her head.
It could be nothing. The brief snippet of conversation probably didn’t mean anything, she told herself. If it had, surely it would have triggered an immediate reaction from her the moment the words were uttered? But then, sitting there in the restaurant surrounded by the unscathed faces of her friends, she’d been oblivious to anything beyond her own misery. Moreover she’d been far too befuddled by drink and painkillers to react immediately to what she’d heard. Maybe she wasn’t too bad a cop after all, even if she was stuck in Traffic, because something had filtered through, something had lodged in her subconscious. And now it had shifted from the back of her mind to lodge firmly at the forefront.
She wandered back to her chair by the window, switching on the radio on the way. As usual it was tuned to BBC Radio 2. Michelle liked Radio 2. She knew it was a bit naff to admit to enjoying something so middle of the road, but she didn’t care. There was something wonderfully unchallenging and restful about Radio 2.
The kind of music somebody at the BBC had chosen as suitable for the early hours wafted over her as she gazed out of the window. She recognized the distinctive notes of Acker Bilk’s trombone playing ‘Stranger on the Shore’. It had been a favourite of her father’s. Michelle’s eyes filled with tears. She so wished her police officer father, the inspiration behind Michelle’s choice of career, were still alive. He would know what to do. He had always known what to do.
Outside, a group of migrating clubbers, three young men and two girls, made their way noisily along the pavement, laughing and talking loudly. Bizarrely, Michelle was reminded of the good old days of Sunday Club. At first glance the little troop sashaying its way along Theobalds Road, so much younger, so much dafter, and no doubt popping E and God knows what else to keep themselves awake, could not have been more different from her old group of friends. But it was the way these kids were with each other, their obvious closeness, their ease in each other’s company, verbally and physically, as they joshed and teased, linked arms and patted backs and shoulders. Surely that was the way she and the other Sunday Clubbers had once been, before everything went wrong.
She ran through them all in her mind: Marlena dead; Alfonso in jail; Ari, seemingly desperate to restore what could never be restored; Greg, no longer able to maintain his upmarket-barrow-boy act; Karen, frightened for Greg, as she probably always had been, missing the way he’d been in the past, anxious about their future, and that of their children; Bob, always inclined to be depressive, now sinking irrevocably into his own malcontent; Tiny and Billy, mourning their lost dog and a lost way of life, but still with each other to cling to; George, unfathomable as ever, but with despair in those dark handsome eyes.
And her? Where did she stand in all of this? Michelle made another mug of tea, pouring boiling water and cold milk over a solitary tea bag, muttering disconsolately to herself as she did so. So far as the group were concerned, Michelle Monahan had been striving to rebuild her life in the wake of her divorce, and young enough and pretty enough and ambitious enough to make a success of it. Wasn’t that the way they’d seen her? The truth was, she’d been far more broken by sorrow than anyone realized. Except, ironically, the husband who had betrayed and then deserted her.
All Michelle had ever wanted was to be a mother. But her attempts to conceive a child had ended in false alarms, an ectopic pregnancy and three miscarriages. And then came the diagnosis of early-stage cervical cancer. She’d been forced to have a hysterectomy in order to survive. Her bosses and colleagues in the force had no idea; she’d told them that she was in hospital for something entirely different, and begged her husband never to reveal the truth. It seemed to Michelle that the loss of her womb had robbed her not only of the chance of becoming a mother but also of her womanhood. And she couldn’t bear to be an object of pity. Her husband had promised it would be their secret, their sad secret. As far as she knew, he had at least kept that promise, the only one of all that he had made. After he left her, she’d questioned whether he’d ever been faithful to her. Whatever the case, she doubted he would have walked out if she had been able to give him a child. Now she’d learned that he was expecting a baby with the new woman in his life. While she, all alone, battered and beaten in more ways than one, would never have a child of her own. With her shattered face and shattered dreams, it was doubtful she would ever again have a man of her own either. Not one she wanted, anyway.