Faith Read online

  They were silent for some moments. Then she said, 'Tell me, I'm curious — how did you know my name?'

  'It wasn't that hard. You're married to the plastic surgeon, right?'

  Cocking her head cheekily, she said, 'Anything else you'd like to tell me about myself?'

  * * *

  There was, but Oliver Cabot held himself in check. He was still in shock at seeing her here. This was his favourite store, that much was true, but he hadn't been here since before Christmas. And he hadn't needed to come today. He'd already bought the wedding present, a porcelain jardiniere, over the phone.

  This stuff works, he kept thinking. If you really want something, you can make it happen. Power of the mind.

  If he had understood it eight years back then maybe, just maybe, Jake would still be alive…

  This morning, on his bicycle, he had been thinking about Faith and had put her out of his mind. Suddenly she had come back in, so strongly that it was as if they'd made telepathic communication. He'd presumed it was just down to wishful thinking. But now she was here, sitting with an expectant grin, waiting for a reply to her question, in her stunning silk scarf and elegant coat. Eight years ago he would have dismissed this as coincidence. His medical training told him there was no such thing as telepathy. And yet, it had taught him what all other doctors learned: that the most powerful drug in the world was the placebo. The power of the human mind.

  She had on little makeup, and her eyes were warm, alert, but that desperation he had seen last night was there too, in her movements, her aura. And there was something else, which he didn't like.

  Without saying anything, he reached across the table, took her left hand lightly by the wrist and began to study her palm. Her wrist was firm, slender, sensuous, but he tried to block that from his mind. Tried to block the smell of her perfume, to ignore the pleasure of holding that warm, soft hand, and just concentrate.

  * * *

  As Oliver Cabot gently traced Faith's lifeline with his forefinger, a tiny erotic tickle coiled through her, startling her, as if a switch had been thrown deep inside her.

  He continued to trace further creases. 'Love line, health line.' He frowned.

  The feeling she had had upstairs, that they were old friends, was deepening.

  'That's your life-line.' He pointed to a second line that intersected it. 'It's broken just over a third of the way down, which means you're going to have a change around your early thirties.' He paused. 'I guess that's where you are now, right?'

  'What kind of change?'

  'Could be anything. But it's a pretty major change.' Then, 'Could be a change of relationship. Divorce.'

  She looked away, awkward now. 'Anything else you can tell from my palm?'

  'Sure. How much else do you want to know?'

  'Just the good stuff — you can edit out the rest.'

  Smiling, he studied her palm again, and suddenly his expression darkened a fraction. When he looked up at her there was concern in his eyes. 'How's your health?'

  She did not tell him that she was feeling queasy. 'It's fine, thanks.' With a nervous shimmy in her voice, she added, 'Why?'

  'No big deal.'

  'What did you see?'

  His hands were attractive and he kept them in good shape. 'I don't want you to worry.'

  'I wasn't worried sixty seconds ago, now I'm scared stiff.'

  'Don't be. Your health-line shows…' He fell silent.

  'Shows?'

  'A possible problem. Just be aware of it. It doesn't necessarily mean a thing.'

  'What kind of a problem?'

  He shrugged. 'Could be anything. Just make sure you have regular check-ups.'

  I just have, she nearly said. This morning. He must be picking up from her that she had some bug. Maybe he could see it in her eyes or her skin or something. 'Is this what you do?' she asked, incredulous. 'Are you a palmist?'

  He laughed. 'I can read palms but I'm not a fortune-teller. I'm interested in all the different ways the outside of the human body can tell us what's happening on the inside.'

  'So what do you do exactly?' Are you a doctor?'

  'Did you hear of the Cabot Centre for Complementary Medicine?'

  The name sounded familiar. She had a feeling there'd been some

  press coverage recently. Then she remembered. 'In The Times about a

  month ago? Was that you delivering a pretty blistering attack on the

  medical profession?'

  He stirred his espresso thoughtfully. 'No disrespect to your husband, but the average conventional Joe Doctor just about any place in the western world is a puppet on a string. A clerk, tied hand and foot, with a decade of wasted training behind him. A victim.'

  'Of what?'

  'A system he helped build because he thought it would make the world a better place. Instead all it did was make a few organisations rich enough to afford absurd dinners like last night.'

  'But you didn't have a problem accepting their hospitality?' she ventured.

  'I was there to snoop, although, actually, I am a paid-up, card-carrying doctor of medicine — I just don't practise as one.'

  'Tell me about the Cabot Centre for Complementary Medicine.'

  'You ought to come and see it — we're doing some real interesting work.'

  'What kind?'

  'I guess we're multi-disciplinary. We have a homeopathy practice, osteopathy, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, chronotherapy —'

  'Chronotherapy?'

  'It's a newly evolving therapy that revolves around the human body clock. We're doing a whole lot of research into circadian rhythms. There's some evidence that humans don't live a twenty-four-hour cycle. Instead we live a twenty-five-and-a-half-hour cycle, which makes us kind of unique on this planet. I have a theory it causes a lot of our health problems. Let me show you the stuff we're doing sometime — or is the wife of an eminent plastic surgeon forbidden to talk to quacks like me?'

  She smiled. Ross always rejected alternative medicine and most forms of complementary medicine too. They'd argued about it in the past. Ross had been furious when Faith had tried acupuncture, on the recommendation of a friend, for a skiing injury. No, more than furious. Incandescent with rage.

  So far as Ross was concerned modern western clinical medicine was the only medicine anyone in their right mind should ever contemplate. He deeply resented that anyone could set themselves up as an alternative medic after only a few weeks of a correspondence course, when he had spent nearly twelve years as a student and apprentice, learning everything that could be learned about every molecule in the human body.

  Ross hated alternative medics even more than he hated the charlatans of plastic surgery — the doctors who set up cosmetic-surgery clinics without any qualifications in plastic surgery, yet were allowed to practice.

  'Maybe your husband would like to come too?' Oliver asked. 'A lot of our treatments and therapies are for post-operative care.'

  She felt a tad disappointed. Was this just a sales pitch? And she could picture Ross's face. 'I don't think so — I mean, he's incredibly busy.'

  She detected his relief and was glad. The invitation to include Ross had been a courtesy, nothing more. It was her he was interested in.

  'How about tomorrow? I can check my diary — maybe you could come over and have some lunch afterwards?'

  'I'd love to, but I live in Sussex. I don't come up to town that often.'

  'Nice part of the world. OK, so next time you're in town?'

  Their eyes met again. This was so good but so dangerous. She was flattered by him, yet common sense was shrieking at her to finish her tea, thank him politely and walk out of his life. Getting entangled with another man was the last thing she needed at this point. She had to sort out her life with Ross, and somehow find an exit for herself and Alec. It was possible that Ross could accept her leaving him to be on her own, but she knew for certain that hell would freeze over before he could accept her leaving for someone else.

  But it
felt so incredibly good being here with this man. As if a chink had opened up in the darkness, through which she could see the possibilities of a life beyond the one she had.

  Oliver Cabot proffered a business card. 'Call me next time you're coming up.'

  She slipped it into her handbag, intending to drop it into a waste-bin before she got home, scared of Ross finding it. 'Thanks,' she said. 'I will.'

  He gave her a yearning look that said, I want you to, but I think you won't.

  11

  The boy stood at the top of the fire escape and put the Shell can down as softly as he could, making only the faintest clink.

  Then, hands clammy inside the rubber gloves, he unzipped the breast pocket of his windcheater, carefully removed the brand-new key and inserted it in the lock of the kitchen door. Holding his breath now he turned it slowly. But in the still night air, the final click sounded as loud as a pistol shot.

  He froze. The sound seemed to take for ever to die away, and as he stood, staring anxiously through the glass panel into the dark kitchen his calm deserted him and he began to panic. But he talked himself through it, and after a couple of minutes he was fine again.

  He glanced down at the small backyard, then up at the skeletal tower block under construction immediately beyond the rear wall. No sign of anyone. This was as he had hoped. So far so good.

  He turned the handle then pushed open the door. It moved noiselessly on hinges he had oiled himself a few days earlier. The stale, greasy smell of a fry-up greeted him, along with the hum of the fridge. He picked up the petrol can and went in, closing the door silently behind him, then stood still in the darkness in the cramped little room, listening.

  He could hear the muffled cries and shrieks of the woman beyond a closed door. 'Oh, yes, oh, my God, yes, do that!'

  He was familiar with the layout of this flat — he'd been here on two previous occasions, always when she was out at work.

  On those visits it had been easy to calculate how much time he had. All he'd needed to do was stop his bike near the Co-op, and from a concealed position behind a tumbledown wall he had a clear view across the road and through the window to the checkout till where she sat throughout her shift, except for her breaks. He simply waited until she arrived for work, and he knew then that he had eight clear hours. Although the most he had ever needed was two.

  That had been on the second visit. The first had been mere curiosity. Fact-finding. Rummaging through drawers, lifting out her garments, smelling the scent of this woman he barely knew. He had lifted out black lace lingerie and had been quite confused by the strange feelings he had experienced when he had pressed the cups of a brassiere to his nose.

  His mission on that visit had been to discover if she kept photographs of him, to see how much he might still mean to her. There were plenty of photographs of herself in frames in the little sitting room, the bedroom and the kitchen. One, the largest of all, a framed black-and-white, had been taken in soft focus. It was a close-up of her head and neck, black ringlets tossed back. She was smiling at someone, her face full of vanity.

  There were more photographs of her in drawers, and in two albums. Photographs of her alone, and with men. On boats, at a horse race, at a motor race, in restaurants, in night-clubs.

  There was just one photograph in the entire flat of himself.

  He found it lying face down at the bottom of a drawer in a wooden chest, amid a jumble of letters and documents. It was small, two inches across, badly creased and curled at one edge, with much of the colour faded. It was of the two of them, sitting together, side by side on a pebble beach. He was about four, wearing swimming trunks, painfully thin, knees drawn up, hair tousled, squinting into the sun. She was sitting next to him, but she could have been a thousand miles away. Dressed in a bikini, wearing dark glasses, she was pouting into the camera. This was a photograph of her and her alone. The boy beside her… did she even know him?

  Would she even remember him today?

  You can't go forgetting people. Not the people who love you. You can't just discard them, walk away from them. You really can't.

  I promise you.

  12

  'Come on, darling, eat it up, it's your favourite.'

  Alec, at the kitchen table in a Rugrats sweatshirt, brown hair, Ross's hair, flopped down over his brow, spaghetti bolognese going cold in front of him, chopsticks stuck in the bowl — he'd been refusing to eat with anything else since Thailand — was rotating a Lego helicopter in his hands.

  'You can play with that later,' Faith said, on edge. 'Granny cooked the spaghetti specially for you.' She was feeling irritable, a combination of her curse due and two drawn-out meetings. This morning she'd spent three hours on the church-roof committee, looking for ways to fund much-needed repairs, and straight after that there had been village meeting, preparing battle-lines for the public inquiry on the proposed golf course. The bouts of nausea were persisting, despite some Zantac tablets Ross had given her, which he thought might clear it up; it was almost a week since her consultation with Jules Ritterman yet she'd heard nothing.

  Ignoring her, Alec plucked a piece of yellow brick from the fuselage, puckered his lips, then pushed it into another slot.

  Faith stood up so sharply her chair fell over. Rasputin, asleep on a bean-bag in front of the Aga, jumped up in surprise. She tore the helicopter out of Alec's hand. 'Eat your supper,' she snapped.

  'Don't want it.'

  She put the helicopter down on the black marble work surface, seized Alec's chopsticks and smashed the spaghetti into small pieces. Ross and her mother spoiled him.

  Her mother sat in silence, at the other end of the table from Alec, fag dangling from her lips, ash dangling from the fag, eyes screwed against the thin thread of smoke, brow furrowed in feigned concentration on the pages of Hello!, which lay open on the huge old pine table in front of her. Occasionally she cast a glance at Neighbours on the television, which was blaring too loudly for Faith's comfort.

  Faith didn't turn the sound down. After all, her mother had looked after Alec all day — it was half-term already. But that was the problem. It didn't matter how old you were, she thought, you'd always be your mother's child, which was one of the reasons she could never bring herself to tell her mother not to smoke at the table while Alec was eating. And, in spite of their differences, she respected her mother. Margaret. A sensible, solid name, and that's how she looked now: sensibly dressed for the country, for this damp night, in her chunky cable-stitched pullover, corduroy trousers, cosy shoes.

  A few months south of sixty, with short grey hair, she had a handsome face lined with sadness and with too many years of heavy smoking. She'd been through her share of suffering. Twenty years of nursing Faith's bedridden father, of watching him steadily deteriorate.

  Ross had been wonderful during those last terrible years, with her father little more than a vegetable. He'd paid for twenty-four-hour nursing care, helped her mother out financially and secured for her father the finest treatment in the country, even though there was little that could be done for him. That was why in her mother's eyes Ross could do no wrong.

  Faith scooped up some spaghetti, mixed it with the meat and held it in front of Alec's mouth. He closed his lips tightly. 'Eat!' she hissed.

  Cigarette bobbing from her lips, 'We had a lovely day, darling,' her mother said. 'We went to —'

  'Alec! Eat this!'

  'Not hungry.'

  'The Bentley Wildfowl Trust,' her mother said. 'Tell Mummy what we saw, Alec' She took the cigarette from her mouth and coughed.

  Faith rounded on her. 'Have you been giving him sweets all day?'

  Looking at Alec, her mother said, 'We had a cheeseburger for lunch. At McDonald's.'

  'What time was that?' Faith demanded.

  She caught a conspiratorial exchange of glances between her mother and Alec. God, her mother who was normally so sensible. When she was with her six-year-old grandson, her brain turned to mush.

  'Mummy, wh
at time did you have lunch?' Faith asked again.

  'It was — er —'

  'I've told you, I want routine. Routine is important for a child. Lunch at one, supper at six, that's Alec's routine. That's the damned routine I used to have as a child.'

  'Ross said that —'

  'To hell with Ross. He's not here all day. I'm Alec's mother, and what I say goes, all right?'

  Again she saw an exchange of glances between the two of them. Like they were sharing some guilty secret. Alec smirked.

  Faith stormed out of the kitchen.

  She walked along the corridor and into the hall, her brain swirling, then through into the snug, with its big old sofa, armchairs, shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks and the massive sixty-inch television, which was on, its sound muted. A newscaster was mouthing words, then the cameras cut away to a woman reporter holding a mike to a man.

  Faith sat on the sofa, seething with anger. Irrational anger, she knew. Routine was important to Alec, but it really didn't matter if there was the odd exception, and if her mother got pleasure out of spoiling him so what? God knows, her life was short enough of pleasures, and being able to summon her down here to babysit at a moment's notice, from her dull little flat in Croydon, was a real boon. There was something else, too, that was causing her bad mood. Something she had been brooding about, for days — and nights, waking often in the small hours of the morning and thinking… thinking… thinking. Trying to get this thing out of her mind and not being able to.

  Her memory of their encounter at the General Trading Company, remained fresh and stubbornly persistent. Several times she'd been tempted to lift the phone and take him up on his offer to show her around the centre, but each time wisdom — or maybe nerves — got the better of her.

  Rasputin padded into the room and came across to her. She put her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. 'Good boy,' she said. 'You never have any problem about eating, do you?'

  Levering herself up from the sofa, she climbed the stairs and went into her bedroom. The dog followed her and stayed in the doorway, watching her. She sat on the bed, opened her handbag, rummaged her way through the contents, down to the bottom, and pulled out the business card, which she had concealed beneath a bunch of petrol receipts. 'Dr Oliver Cabot. The Cabot Centre for Complementary Medicine,' she read, guiltily.