As soon as Cornelia had found her way onto the street, she realised two things: that she wasn’t entirely sure how to get to the building she had only seen through a telephoto lens, and that once there she would be faced with the task of attempting to help someone whose whole way of life involved holding the forces of law and order in contempt. The first of these issues resolved itself upon her running to the end of the narrow terraced street, and seeing, just a short way along the next thoroughfare, a familiar-looking three-storey block looming up in front of her. She even fancied she could pick out which window was Isobel’s, but would worry about that when she got there. A third thought then occurred to her, which was that she would have done better to have headed the other way to start with and have picked up the car; but it was too late by then, as she neared the front door.
The first obstacle was the intercom lock. She scanned the few names tattily listed – as if Carman would have advertised himself? Would the top floor flats have higher numbers, she wondered, as she moved to the bottom of the list? One of the highest numbers had a blank space by its bell, but pressing it got no response – hardly surprising she thought, if it was Isobel answering. She pressed another by it, and a woman’s voice sounded. Forget the undercover operation, Cori thought as she spoke,
‘Hello, this is Sergeant Smith, I’m a police officer. I was hoping you could let me in please. I need to access a flat on the top floor. We need to help someone inside.’ A plea to the lady’s better nature worked wonders – always much better than ordering the public around, Cori had found – and the door clanked open without delay. The woman who had opened it was stood by her open door on the third floor corridor by the time Cori had run up there,
‘Officer, is that the flat you want?’ she directed eagerly, knowing instantly where the trouble would lie. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to sort them out at last. But you’ve missed him, he hasn’t been here for days.’
Cori would later realise that the lady hadn’t asked her for her warrant card, so grateful was she perhaps for any member of the authorities to be there. It was a sad aspect of undercover operations, as Cori would lament once time again permitted, that for the span of their duration it could appear as though the police were actively standing off of those individuals the public wished would have their full attention.
The Sergeant banged hard on the door, ‘Isobel, Isobel. Please open up. You’re not in trouble, but we need to get you to the doctors.’
‘Oh my, is she alright?’ asked the woman, ‘She’s such a little thing, and I’m sure he bashes her about.’
‘Stand back,’ and with that Cori kicked the door by the lock, then again. On the third attempt it swung open as far as the chain would catch, before pulling the chain’s roots from the plaster. The neighbour, stood behind Cori as she did this, gasped to see Isobel slumped on the floor and only half-way to getting herself back onto the sofa. Half-conscious and dishevelled, she bore a bruise to her cheek and a cut above her eyebrow. The orange juice she had grasped for had spilt onto the floor and was being absorbed by the fabric of her nightdress.
Eight hours later, Inspector Rase was stood silently at the door of a hospital ward, watching the sleeping figure of Isobel Semple, the first rays of sunlight peeping through the slats of the blinds to cast their bright gaze over the sheets of her bed. There was only one other patient in the four-berthed room; an older woman who was asleep for the entire time Grey was there.
For most of the evening he had been on a chair placed outside in the hall, the patient more than anything requiring her sleep. The detectives had first taken Isobel to Accident and Emergency; but she was soon moved to a general ward, upon the staff’s discovering she was suffering from no worse than dehydration and fatigue, and perhaps a slight concussion. She had slept throughout, hardly murmuring as they cleaned up her wounds; and now as Grey watched her in repose, shiny-skinned and freshly bandaged, he couldn’t help but think that even this soon after being taken from that awful situation, Isobel’s face seemed so much happier. Perhaps her body was just glad of the sleep, for it was surely too fanciful, even for Grey’s imagination, to think she somehow knew, without having opened her eyes all night, that she had been brought somewhere clean and safe and where she could rest till morning.
They themselves had been offered family beds to rest on, and though Cornelia had grabbed a couple of hours, Grey had found he couldn’t sleep. His mind had been racing, part in piecing together what they knew of the case, and part in exploring what a particular author he enjoyed reading in his spare hours might have termed the wonder of it all: the wonder of having his quarry of these last three years now so close and safe and under their care. This girl, the Southney Snowdrop – how had the Superintendent put it earlier? – ‘The most famous case our town has known in recent times’, and she was surely the most intriguing figure in their town’s recent history. And now all that remained was to get her back home, one last short drive along the motorway. Truly, if Grey could have summed up his feelings at this point, he would have likened them to those of John Wayne in The Searchers.
As her staff had been tending to the patient, the Ward Sister had called Grey to her office. A practical woman, but one who Grey felt must feel something of the wonder too, she had some appreciation of just who was in her charge this night. For Isobel was, as a result of her recent media campaign, both a regional and to some extent national figure; not only Southney’s Snowdrop but everyone’s. And he had beaten all the odds to find her after such a stretch of time.
‘I couldn’t help noticing the patient’s name,’ the Ward Sister had said, as leaving her team working, she led Grey to her office. ‘And here all these years, in such a busy city?’
‘It does happen,’ he lamented; before speaking briskly of Isobel’s current state, ‘I don’t know what you need to know, but I can offer at least this much: that we found Isobel earlier this evening in an unhappy situation of a criminal nature; discovered as part of a colleague’s undercover operation, of which she was only indirectly involved. I wish I could say more...’
‘So is she going to be charged?’ asked the Ward Sister warily.
‘Not by us; in fact quite the opposite,’ he continued, attempting to load his words with as much gravity as he could muster. ‘Barring whatever treatment you deem fit, for her own safety we would be glad to have Isobel out of the city as soon as possible come the morning.’
The Ward Sister took all this in before replying. However there were other considerations; for during their talk a nurse had knocked gently on the door, and popped in to share a whispered conference with her superior, before being dismissed.
‘The nurse informed me,’ announced the Ward Sister, ‘that quite apart from her head wound, Isobel’s body bears certain signs we are accustomed to seeing, and which it is our sad duty to have to look out for. Certain small scars around the eyes and mouth, faded bruising on the arms... Inspector, I wonder if you could confirm to me whether this recent life of Isobel’s has involved instances of abuse?’
‘That may well have been the case,’ he answered, which was after all the best he knew.
She took a deep intake of breath. ‘Then, come the morning you get her well away from here,’ was the last thing the Ward Sister said on the subject.
It turned out that, bar offering her a few hours sleep, there was little more they could do for Isobel here this night. She could be released to the officers’ care, their only instruction being that she be referred to Southney General Infirmary later that day for a check up and for her dressings to be changed.
It being the middle of the night, and they both being at something of a loose end, the Ward Sister made the Inspector coffee and they spoke awhile: of her job, and how the nightshifts could sometimes be little more than being on call but at work – so different from the hectic days – but how this gave her the time to get so much done; and of how her ward inspections at this time were silent walks down empty corridors on rubber soles, doors found by torchlight and openin
g on oiled hinges, her feelings almost maternal as she cast a carer’s gaze over her nocturnal charges.
Then their talk turned to his job, and how his days could be anything from eight hours behind his desk to fifteen on foot and in car and in interview rooms, facing down the most soulless creatures it could be any person’s worst wish to want to spend time with; and how his nights were most often his own – in every sense, she would infer – to rest and unwind in, and even down a jar or two, if that was what it took to align the things he had seen that day with any kind of caring model of the world and our place in it. You wouldn’t do his job, he concluded, if it wasn’t in your bones. The look she gave him confirmed she and her fellow professionals felt just the same.
At two a.m. she had a ward inspection scheduled, and then a stocktake of deliveries – which came in at night, she explained, the roads so much clearer then. And so the Ward Sister bade the Inspector goodnight, though leaving him with the warm impression that, should he ever find himself in town and with an hour to kill some evening, then he would be more than welcome to partake again of her hospitality.
He looked in on Cori in the family room, sound asleep and curled into the foetal position, and looking so content he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her raise her hand and begin sucking her thumb. Her suit was folded over the chair beside the bed, the nurses having found her nightwear, presumably some always kept available. And he thought, as he resumed his walk along the corridor, how the people who find themselves staying here won’t always have known to pack an overnight bag. And as he sat down to start his lonely vigil outside Isobel’s room, this thought struck him as both terrifying and terribly sad.
Chapter 21 – Isobel Waking
Friday