Page 28 of Watching You
The Balmoral Hotel next to Edinburgh’s Waverley Stationresembled a grand, petrified wedding cake and it was Connie’s go-to when they were in Scotland, for its spacious suites and the pool where she could be found at 5 a.m. almost without exception. Once an island girl, always an island girl, was her mantra. The water called her. Baarda was happier with an extra hour of sleep and a session in the gym before breakfast. He’d sworn off 5 a.m. starts when his children finally grew out of their toddler years. These days, getting them out of their bedrooms at all when they stayed with him was something of a miracle.
‘Hey!’ She nudged his leg with an elbow. ‘You’re miles away. Want to help me solve a murder or three?’
‘Why aren’t you doing your thing?’ he asked.
‘My thing? I train for years, work my ass off chasing criminals across the world, occasionally getting down and nasty with the odd serial killer, and you reduce it to my “thing”?’ She rolled onto her back and threw the end of the celery stick at the bin, scoring a perfect shot. Baarda knew better than to talk too much. Connie wanted to think. She just did it better when he was next to her. ‘Okay.’ She flexed her neck and got comfortable. ‘Let’s start at Jupiter Artland. I liked it there. Can you hit the light switch from there? My imagination works better in darkness.’
He reached up and hit the switch. The hotel lamps faded to black. Baarda settled down, careful not to brush Connie’s legs, painfully aware of their proximity and how much he never wanted to do anything she could misconstrue. Connie putting her trust in him was a shining light in his life and he wasn’t about to do anything to risk dimming it, even inadvertently.
‘Lie next to me,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be my dead people.’
Baarda rolled his eyes, aware that Connie would know he was doing so, whether she could see it or not.
‘You’ve gotta let me be me. Open your mind. It’s science, not voodoo. This is how my brain makes connections.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ he muttered as he lay on his side, one hand propped on an elbow.
In the minuscule amount of light from the hotel’s smoke alarm on the ceiling, he could see Connie do the same next to him, washed red by the flash every thirty seconds.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
He could hear that she was smiling in spite of the gravity of what they were trying to do. This was what lit her up – travelling into the minds of killers, reaching out with her absurdly advanced intuition and perception; it was like watching a maths genius work out a seemingly impossible sum in their head.
‘Be Dale Abnay for me,’ she said.
Baarda let go of his reservation – in for a penny, in for a pound – and dived in. Abnay, thirty-three years of age, unable to make connections with women, living alone in semi-squalor, but somehow – amid his many failings – the man had offered to be a kidney donor for a friend in need.
‘I’m confused,’ he said. ‘I tell myself I hate the thing I want more than anything else, because hate is so much easier to live with than loneliness. And you can’t tell other men that you’re lonely because men don’t like seeing weakness in others. It’s a reminder that it’s there inside them too. So we get together online and at the pub and talk about how much we hate women. But we don’t really. We hate ourselves for not being able to get one or keep one. We hate ourselves for not even being man enough to tell the truth about our feelings. Then after a while we hate just because we got lazy and gave up even contemplating changing our lives for the better. Then you wake up one day and you’re a shell. You’re just going through the motions. Might as well be dead.’
Connie didn’t speak for a long, long time.
Baarda wondered if she’d finally fallen asleep, until she asked, ‘Is that why you agreed to donate a kidney to Wolfie? To try to feel something good again?’
It was Baarda’s turn to pause.
‘Yes?’ Another pause. ‘Yes. It was a connection. Maybe even a lifeline. To have someone need me. Be grateful to me. It was one pure thing, and I sort of knew that if I didn’t say yes, if I didn’t at least try to reach out to another human being, then it was game over.’
‘But you didn’t hate everything,’ Connie probed. ‘You liked Jupiter Artland. You went there often. What was it about that place that attracted you?’
Baarda shrugged in the darkness, his shoulders brushing the carpet and making a brief shushing noise. ‘It was like a reset. The city only offered girls I couldn’t have – girls going shopping, wearing short skirts, getting drunk, looking at me like I was nothing. The beach is full of kids screaming, couples walking hand in hand like a poster for a life that wasn’t mine. Artland is an escape. I like the structure, the symmetry, the simplicity and patterns. You can stay away from other people most of the time. It was like offering my kidney – something good that I could cling onto.’
‘And the Weeping Girls – did you ever stand there and imagine it was you who’d made them cry?’ Connie asked.
Baarda found his mouth suddenly dry. ‘I … I don’t know.’
‘Think about it,’ she pressed.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘They’re very young though.’
‘Young like when you first met Lucy Ogunode?’
‘That’s a low blow,’ he said instinctively.
‘Ah. So you weren’t a completely hollow shell. There was still something happening in the soul, in spite of all the porn and posters.’
‘Mmm,’ Baarda murmured noncommittally.
‘Dale, who do you think killed you?’ she asked. Baarda could feel her closer to him, her breath on his cheek, the smell of the Chanel No.5 she’d dabbed on that morning that had faded to an almost-memory on the skin of her neck.
