Blackwater - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,14

get up and begin the search for them.

‘Excuse me, miss, have you seen a set of car keys? I was here just a minute ago’ – over and over. If they were lost, I would walk home, or call the RAC and pretend to be a young woman on her own so they’d come quickly. I was past caring about anything.

At the pharmacy on the ground floor I exchanged the prescription for a bottle of pills and bought paper, stamps and envelopes from a little newsagent in the same patient-friendly grouping. Hospital is dull. I saw a bald cancer kid and wondered how they get through the days. Time moves really slowly in there.

I couldn’t send the first letter I wrote. It was one of those you do to get everything clear in your head. It was angry and I swore a lot. If I’d sent that, my brother might have had me committed to the mental wing back at Brighton General. There is a real difference between committing yourself and having someone else do it for you. Apart from the way you are treated, the main thing is that you can walk out when you see the nurses violently restraining someone as they scream and spit blood. If you are sectioned and sent there, even for something as harmless as depression and a suicide watch, you can’t get out – you’re in the system and they lose all interest in how you feel or what you need.

I tore the letter into tiny shreds in case someone had the time to glue it back together in between emptying the bins of a hospital. Even though I knew it was stupid, I still made sure the pieces ended up in two separate bins.

I kept the second try short. It said I was having trouble with Carol and I didn’t know what to do. If you’d asked me then what I was hoping for, I probably couldn’t have told you. I couldn’t handle Denis Tanter and I couldn’t see a way out. That’s when you ask for help. You don’t know what the help is going to be. If you did, you could probably do it on your own. I put it in the hospital postbox and walked stiffly away from it without looking back. It was done. He would either come or he wouldn’t.

Two days later he left a message on the answering machine to say he was on the way. Nothing more, just ten seconds of his voice while I sat and watched the machine. Hearing him brought back a lot of unpleasant memories. I took my half-empty bottle of Laphroaig to keep me warm, put on my best black suit and wrote a letter to Carol. I left it on the kitchen table where she would see it if she came back. After that I walked down to the beach, and when it was dark I stood on the edge of the black sea, looking out. I finished the whisky and scooped up a little salt water to cut the taste of it. It was as bitter as I was, and it was around then that I stopped feeling the cold and walked into the water.

I don’t know how long I stood there before he found me. He’d read the letter on the table. I knew he would.

I told him all of it as we walked back along the dark streets of Brighton. The wind had picked up and I was shivering so he gave me his coat. It smelled of cigars and his aftershave, which wasn’t one I knew. It was a better coat than I have ever owned and I could feel its weight and softness like the first touches of guilt.

He hardly commented as we walked together, asking just an occasional question about Denis or Michael, my impressions of them. I had to tell him more than I wanted to about Carol or it would have seemed nonsense. It came out in pieces, and once he looked at me and shook his head in slow amazement.

‘And you want her back?’ he said. I hated him then.

I told him everything I could remember, anything that might help him to understand the two men who had come into my life and pushed me to desperation. I tried not to think that I was considering murder or, at the least, allowing murder in my name. I wanted them out of my life, and somewhere during the second beating in