Fragile Minds Page 0,5
and he hoped I was feeling better.
The headache had gone, but I didn’t feel better. I just felt frightened. I’d lost a few hours from last night; I remembered leaving work, being on the bus and then – what? Waking in Rafe’s porch; being carried into the flat. An overwhelming sense of anxiety pulsed through me. Images from yesterday flickered through my mind, like a camera shutter opening and closing too fast. I sat on the sofa, my head in my hands, and tried to breathe.
Was it happening again?
I washed my face and hands beneath the expensive lighting in Rafe’s stark bathroom and, trying to calm my tousled hair, I opened the medicine cabinet above the basin, looking for what Rafe called ‘product’. A packet of Well Woman tablets fell out. I picked them up, frowning. Next to them, a pink electric toothbrush, and a jar of Clinique night cream.
I shut the cabinet door, and walked into his bedroom. It all looked the same as ever, until I opened the drawers by the side of the bed. There was a pale blue hairband and some expensive hand cream.
It underlined something I had been avoiding … that Rafe and I were really only a stopgap. Meeting by chance at the Sadler’s Wells charity do in January, it had always felt a little like I was one of his pet projects; that we were keeping each other warm on cold winter nights.
But now it was summer.
Grabbing my stuff, I ran down the stairs and buzzed myself out, the fortress door slamming behind me. I stood at the top of the shiny steps to the street. A milk float trundled slowly down the deserted road, and a ginger cat cleaned its ears discreetly as it sat beneath the frothy mimosa tree; it looked at me with disdain and then carried on licking. And I remembered Tessa’s soaked and illegible note in my hand yesterday afternoon and I had this sudden overriding feeling that I should be somewhere, and I felt a rising panic, because I just didn’t know where.
FRIDAY 14TH JULY KENTON
How the hell she had ended up having to do this alone, she would never know. Cursing quietly, DS Lorraine Kenton backed the car into the small space, knocked the adjacent Audi’s mirror and then looked around guiltily to see if anyone had noticed. It had taken over half an hour to find a parking space because the bloody NCP was shut for some reason, and she was seriously over-tired and crochety. She’d slept badly because all night she’d kept dreaming that she’d forgotten what she was meant to say in the TV studio and no one would tell her the lines so she just sat frozen in fear on the famous cream sofa of Crime Live!, opposite the immaculate ice-maiden presenter who stared at her blankly.
At six, Kenton had woken with relief, before realising with horror she really did have to go on TV today. In an effort to rouse herself, she’d drunk too much black coffee in a foolish attempt to get those little grey cells working and thrown half a mug of it down her new white shirt, which meant she had to plump for the crumpled stripy one. She didn’t have time to iron it because she’d nicked the fuse out of the plug last week for her hairdryer, which had been unused for at least two years prior to her first date, on the Southbank, with Alison from the dating website Guardian Soulmates. Now the only consequence of all that coffee was a mismatched outfit and a horribly pounding heart, her brain exactly as slow and sludge-like as when she’d first woken.
The television studio was on a small side street off Berkeley Square. Kenton checked the A-Z and, grabbing her jacket from the back seat hoping it would cover the crumpled stripes, wondered for at least the forty-eighth time this morning why the hell she’d volunteered to replace Gill McCarthy from the Press Office when she had become ‘unavailable’ at the last minute yesterday evening (for unavailable read: had just found out her boyfriend in Organised Crime was screwing McCarthy’s number two, Jo Reid, who wore a wanton look, too much red lipstick and her dresses practically slashed to the waist. Obvious, maybe, but Kenton could definitely see her appeal).
Her phone rang. Her pounding heart slowed and sank. It was DI Craven.
‘I’ll meet you there, pet,’ he said. ‘At Audley Street. Running slightly late.’
‘Really? I thought I