The bone road, p.12
The Bone Road, page 12
‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘That’s not true. Of course you got angry. He got his career break writing about you. How could you be fine with that?’
She shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘I told him it was okay.’
‘Again, that was not the question. Did you like him writing publicly about the end of your career? It must have been humiliating for you.’
‘What happened to me was an accident. It wasn’t humiliating, it was sad.’
‘He wrote about coming to see you and your colostomy bag leaking. I think that was pretty humiliating.’
‘It was fine,’ said Heather, looking at the floor.
‘I don’t think it’s fine. I think it’s exploitative. He wrote a regular column about you in a Sunday newspaper, about living with someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He built up quite a following. Especially amongst women. I’ve seen some of the comments on the articles. They weren’t exactly sympathetic towards you. They were all about Ryan. Propositions, I’d call them. It must have annoyed you. It would have annoyed me. No, it would have disgusted me.’
‘He thought those women were ridiculous. He asked the paper to switch off the comments.’
‘So, they did upset you.’
‘He was worried that they might. He loves me. I love him.’
‘Okay. But sometimes we love people and are also very angry with them. I think you had resentment towards Ryan. From where I’m sitting, it looks like he used you.’
Heather said nothing. Had he used her when he wrote the articles? He swore that he hadn’t. It was years ago. Did it even matter now?
‘No relationship is perfect, Inspektor. He wrote some things about me, which, yes, perhaps I’d prefer he hadn’t. But he did. And I forgave him. He’s a good man, not a perfect one. God knows, I’m not perfect either. He forgives me too.’
‘How aren’t you perfect, Heather? What does he need to forgive you for?’
‘It’s a figure of speech.’
‘You fight a lot, don’t you?’
‘All couples fight.’
‘I don’t know. My wife and I fought a lot. And then we divorced.’
Heather stared up at him through red-rimmed lids.
‘He meets women when you sleep, but you insist everything is okay. I say that is not okay, Heather. It’s not healthy.’
Heather wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that his version of them was skewed and mutated, a ghastly misreading, but when she tried to speak her tongue was a fat piece of Velcro stuck to the roof of her mouth and her thoughts were loose and strange. She was desperate to cling to her vision of them as a couple; she was terrified for Ryan, and the thought of his pain and the blood, so much blood, was a red stain trickling through her vision. And yet, there was a tiny bright seam of anger and uncertainty like a gleam of marble in granite. She needed to keep it together. She met Simo’s eye then looked away.
‘You are not okay, Heather.’
‘It’s been a rough few days. I didn’t mean for yesterday to happen.’
‘Of course not. And is that what happened to Ryan? Something that you didn’t mean to happen? You were angry with him. You have a lot to be angry with him about, and so you cycled close to the edge of the road, pushed him, he skidded . . . and you didn’t mean for it to happen.’
‘No! That’s absurd.’
‘Is it? It’s what happened yesterday. That man is lucky to have got away with a fractured cheekbone. You’re a professional racer and you know how to use a bike as a weapon, don’t you, Heather?’
‘Stop it!’ she snapped, and took a breath in an attempt to muster some composure. ‘I told your boss earlier. I’m sorry about yesterday. So sorry. It was stupid. But it doesn’t mean that I hurt Ryan.’
Simo looked at her steadily, not giving away whether or not he believed her. ‘Tell me about your accident. It was a petrol tanker?’
‘I don’t like to talk about it.’ Heather sat back in the chair and folded her arms. The pain in her neck was throbbing, flaming along the damaged nerves. It was hard to focus her thoughts. She reached for her bag and took out the bottle of pills and started to unfasten it, until she remembered she’d already taken one earlier and began to put it away.
‘May I?’ said Simo, reaching for the bottle.
Heather handed it to him. ‘Painkillers.’
Simo put on his spectacles and read the label. ‘And you take these for?’
‘Nerve pain,’ she answered, defensively and by rote. ‘I damaged the nerves in my neck in the accident.’
Simo returned the bottle. ‘That sounds awful. I am sorry you suffer so much. But these pills, they are not for nerve pain. They are not painkillers of any kind. They are antidepressants with an antipsychotic effect.’
‘They’re not. It’s just the pain makes me depressed and anxious.’
‘You can lie to whoever else you want, but you and I know better, Heather.’
Simo quietly took out his phone and typed in the drug name, and slid it across the table to Heather, showing her the search results.
Aripiprazole: an antipsychotic drug used in the treatment of resistant depression with schizoid symptoms. Side effects include headaches, shortness of breath, night sweats, nausea, dryness of the mouth . . .
She looked away and shoved the phone back at him.
‘I get anxious. That’s all.’
‘No,’ said Simo, quietly. ‘Aripiprazole is not for nxiety. This is not a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. You have to stop lying, Heather. I understand that people who have been through trauma do all sorts of things to survive. I am sorry that you had to lie to Ryan about your medication, but you do not need to lie to me.’ He paused and forced her to meet his eye. ‘You must not lie to me.’
She reached for the cup again but fumbled it, sloshing tea over the table. She swore. Met Simo’s kind but dogged gaze. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you about them. I’m used to lying to Ryan. He worries when I take antidepressants. His fretting makes it worse. He hovers. I feel sometimes like he’s there just waiting for me to fuck up again, so it’s easier to tell him that they’re painkillers.’
Simo studied her. ‘But they have an antipsychotic element too.’
She said nothing for a moment, knowing how her next words could seem, but she had already gone too far. She had no choice. ‘When the depression gets bad, I can hear voices.’
Simo sat back. A small gesture, but one that signalled to Heather he’d made a breakthrough.
‘Do they tell you to do things? To hurt yourself? To hurt others?’
‘No! Mostly they just talk about me. It’s like overhearing voices on the radio.’
Simo regarded her with great sympathy. ‘I very much want to believe you.’
The door reopened and Josif entered and stood silently at the back of the room. She ignored him.
‘Can you tell me about the fight with Jessie Taylor?’ continued Simo.
What the hell did she have to do with any of this?
Simo slid out a typed document from the file on the table. ‘I have some information here, but I would like to hear you tell it.’
Heather stared at him. ‘I mean, we bickered, we didn’t get on. She was my domestique in the British cycling squad. We barely spoke.’
‘You put her in the hospital. The summer after the Rio Olympics,’ said Josif from the back of the room.
That was ridiculous. ‘I did not.’
Simo turned round the file and showed Heather a typed statement from the Metropolitan Police, complete with her signature. ‘This is you?’
Heather read through the statement, which described how she had thrown a bottle at Jessie Taylor in a bar, after she had seen Jessie laughing at her. She gazed down at the document in utter bewilderment and then up at Simo.
‘How did you get that?’
‘And see here, there are these pictures,’ said Josif, stepping forward and producing photographs of Jessie with a nasty black eye and cuts and bruises to her left cheek. He placed them on the table in front of Heather. She stared at them in horror. Josif leant back against the wall, arms folded, and surveyed her with apparent disgust.
‘I swear to you I don’t remember doing that.’
Heather sat back, bile rising, slick with sweat, unable to look at the photos. ‘I was going through a lot of stuff at that time. It was just after my accident. I honestly don’t remember. I’m not lying to you. Not now,’ she said, a lump rising in her throat and choking her.
Simo nodded, not unkindly. ‘That’s okay. It’s here, in the report. No charges were brought. The police officer who interviewed you says that soon after the incident you had very patchy recollection of the crime. Recent massive head trauma. T.B.I. Traumatic brain injury. No realistic chance of conviction. Jessie Taylor didn’t want to press charges. She felt sorry for you.’
Heather put her head in her hands.
‘Do you still forget things, Heather? Do you still lie about that?’
‘Jesus. I’m not lying! Why would I remember it! I have gaps from the time after the accident. And I have trouble with my short-term memory. Small things. Appointments. Where I put things. Faces.’
‘It’s more than that. You lied to me about the pills. Lying to the police is an offence. Ryan was here in the nineties, but you can’t be certain exactly what he said. Are you sure Ryan never told you about this woman he calls Dušica? You committed a serious assault on Jessie Taylor. If she hadn’t been so generous and sympathetic, you could have been sent to prison. You repressed the memory. Some things you simply lie about . . .’ He paused and then gave a sad shake of his head. ‘But I also worry that you have no idea what things you have done and then forgotten.’ He pushed the pictures of Jessie’s battered face towards her. ‘Heather, I cannot be certain that you didn’t kill Ryan. Can you?’
She stood rooted in the square, listening to the thrum of traffic. It wasn’t true. Couldn’t be. And they’d released her – not enough evidence to hold her any longer. Nonetheless, she began to run, desperate to get far from the police station, running until she found herself on the bridge with its curving arches. It was dark and the lights from a dozen lanterns pooled on the bridge, lemony yellow in a glittering arc. It looked so pretty, the foaming water just catching the light as it rushed beneath, the bubbles blinking into stars. Yet Heather could sense the ghosts as they fell, shot from the bridge, their cries mingling with the burbling of the Drina, the blue water turning red then black. Its beauty was an affront. She could ease herself out onto the balustrade and disappear into the surge and all this would be over. The rhythm of the water grinding against the stones was hypnotic. It was only a small jump. She was many things, but a coward was not one of them, and that was a coward’s way out. And it galled her to think that if she jumped then they’d all take it as an admission of guilt.
‘I did not do this,’ she said aloud, hoping as much as believing that it was not true.
Of course you didn’t, said a familiar voice in her head. You’d never do that.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing on the present. She tried to block out the photograph of Jessie with ten crusting stitches along the side of her face. It was true that yesterday – albeit by accident – she had forced a stranger off the road, so that he’d fractured his cheek. The pure fury that had driven her to chase him down had overwhelmed her. Even now the police were considering pressing charges. Calamity stalked her. She had spent days wondering who Ryan was; the man she’d been living with for years, who’d been keeping secret after secret. But with a jolt of self-doubt she realised, too, that now she needed to ask: who the hell was she?
No. She reprimanded herself. They were playing mind games. She’d raced enough to know that those who won did not succumb to the mind games of lesser riders. And that’s what this was: a manoeuvre. She might not understand the motivation, or why the police wanted her in pieces at the kerbside, but she recognised the signs – they were behaving no differently to one of the losing teams pulling desperate and dubious tactics in the last stage of a Grand Tour. She would not let them get inside her head. She must not let them. If she couldn’t hold onto her sense of self, then she was lost, and so was Ryan.
A wave of nausea hit her with the force of a punch to the stomach, and she dashed over to a litter bin and vomited. She’d refused Simo’s offer to drive her back to Zikoč. She had to get out of this creepy town, with its leering statues and the Disney-esque façade that masked its grotesque past. It was the place that was making her crazy; some inverted netherworld, the beauty of which belied the reality. But she couldn’t face the long bike ride back to Zikoč and she couldn’t stay here. She pulled out her phone. A few minutes’ search on TripAdvisor suggested her best bet was a spa hotel in the hills, a little way out. Shivering with cold and exhaustion, she hurried over to the taxi office in the main street, wondering again at the uncanny emptiness of the town. After a brief wait, a driver was found, willing to take her and her bike the short distance to the hotel.
The journey to the Vilina Vlas Spa was short but it took her up into the mountain and into the woods. The serpentine road was a paring of bone, white between the black forests on either side. The moon was a blown bubble bobbing above them. They turned off the road and onto a long winding track, leading further into the trees. Where on earth was this hotel? Perhaps she ought to have gone back to bloody Zikoč with Simo. She stared out the window, glimpsing a pair of yellow eyes and a flash of movement in the trees. She gave an involuntary, feral shudder. The track leading to the hotel was surprisingly smooth and well maintained, and the driver pulled up and let her out in front of an ugly modern building with a red roof.
‘Hotel,’ he said helpfully.
When he made no effort to help her to remove her bike from the car, she did it herself. Heather watched the taxi drive away, fighting an odd urge to wave him back and ask him to take her on to the grotty motel in Zikoč. She listened for the sound of the engine as it grew fainter and fainter, until there was nothing but the stirring of the leaves and the night-time tick and shuffle of the woods. It was very still, but beneath the stillness was a buzz, almost electric. It was the same feeling that Heather had had when she stood on the bridge in Višegrad. She’d come here to get away from that dread, but it had chased her down. Though, after everything that had happened, she had to acknowledge that she was probably carrying it with her. The dread and shock of Ryan’s vanishing had seeped into her consciousness, poisoning her thoughts. She chained up her bike in a rack at the side of the hotel, shouldered her saddle-bag and pushed open the door into the lobby.
At first she thought the reception was deserted, and then a slightly surprised man appeared with a broad smile. He greeted her in Serbian.
‘English, I’m afraid,’ said Heather.
‘Wonderful. So very good,’ he said. ‘You have very good stay here. We have nice pool. You have massage if you like. You looking tired.’
‘I am,’ agreed Heather, handing over her credit card and passport with relief.
‘You hungry? We have restaurant,’ said the man.
Heather shook her head. She craved quiet. A silent room to be alone and think about Ryan. If he was dead, please don’t let him have suffered. The man reached for a key and gestured for her to follow. The hotel lobby had been recently re-carpeted and the walls papered in a shiny fleur-de-lis, while banal and soothing prints of waterfalls and lily ponds of the sort beloved of doctor’s surgeries adorned the walls. As they went up the stairs, she noticed that the carpets were worn and threadbare and there was the distinctive smell of damp. The walls had been repainted, but the old flowered paper showed through like phantom roses.
‘The view is very nice from this floor. Is dark now, but in the morning, you see view of river and woods. Everybody like.’
He unlocked the door and with a proud conjurer’s wave gestured Heather into a dank, musty room that did not deserve the build-up. He turned on the light and it flickered orange, a moth thudding dismally against the shade.
‘Bath with shower through that door,’ he said. ‘Towels are included in price.’
Heather realised she hadn’t thought to ask the room rate and also that she did not care. She just wanted him to leave. ‘Thank you,’ she said and closed the door. There were twin beds, and floor-length curtains fluttered before the black windows. She hurried over to close them, noticing that the windows opened onto some sort of balcony. The familiar fingers of pain probed her neck and a wave of anxiety crested and broke in cold ripples down her back. She reached in her bag for the bottle of pills, then with an exclamation of fury grabbed the bottle and hurried into the bathroom. She unscrewed the lid, tipped the contents down the toilet and flushed them away.
She sat back on the cold tiled floor and tried to recall her conversations with the various doctors. She had suffered a brain contusion and had a metal plate in her skull. There had been personality changes. She knew she was more irritable than she used to be, but the assault on Jessie had come relatively soon after the accident and had been a one-off. Hadn’t it? It was a terrible thing she’d done and she’d pushed the trauma of it to the deepest recesses of her mind. And yesterday was an accident.
Heather knew that most brain injury patients suffered degrees of short-term memory loss. She had all sorts of tricks for coping with hers. The flat had to be tidy, but she could never remember which drawer was forks and which was takeaway menus. Her counsellor had told her that depression was a common symptom after a brain injury, both the trauma and the unwelcome changes to her life and career triggering mood changes. Then there were the voices. The ones telling her she was worthless and useless and good for nothing. But she knew they were in her head. Like she’d told Simo, sometimes she thought she overheard them talking about her on the radio. Occasionally, just to complicate things, the radio really did talk about her. She was a public figure of national pity. She swore aloud, her own voice startling her in the silence. She would not fall apart – she was tougher than they all thought. Part of being an elite athlete was physical fitness, and hell, she was far from her peak – older, with bones that had been broken and imperfectly healed, she would never reach her optimal fitness again – yet she had remarkable stamina. She was relentless: she never, ever gave up. Her former colleagues made snide remarks when they’d thought she couldn’t hear – that she was part robot, an automaton – and while an element of that stamina was physical it was also mental tenacity. Heather Bishop was stubborn beyond all reason. However much they tried to persuade her that she was crazy, she would not let them. She would fight back by reminding herself what was real, even as the world unmade itself all around her.
