Page 24 of Watching You

‘Makes no sense,’ Connie said. She lay on the floor of her hotel suite, stretched out on her stomach, knees bent, waving her feet in the air, in the centre of a circle of scattered pieces of paper. In one hand she held a stick of celery that she was dipping in and out of a tub of humous.

‘Any particular bit or just the whole damned mess?’ Baarda asked, pouring himself a glass of vintage Fonseca and loosening his tie.

‘Stop peering at me from the sofa like some disapproving professor and get down here with me,’ she demanded.

‘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.

‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I was just walking. I know Artland so well now I never have to check the map or the path signs. The blow came from nowhere. It makes no sense.’

‘Did anyone want you dead?’

‘I don’t think I was worth enough to anyone to want me dead,’ Baarda said slowly. ‘I don’t think I ever made enough of an impact on anyone’s life for them to care whether or not I lived or died.’

Connie sighed.

‘Did you mind dying?’ she whispered.

‘I never got the chance to be better. I wanted to give Wolfie his kidney. I thought that might be a new start for me. And I never knew what it was like to have a woman care about me. It’s sad dying, like that, knowing there’s no girlfriend or wife who’ll miss you or cry over you.

Whatever else I did wrong, it would have been nice to have had someone that missed me.

Other than Wolfie, of course, and I doubt that he’d have bothered with me either if I hadn’t been a match. ’

Connie made a tiny noise that Baarda couldn’t decipher.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll do my best to make it up to you now.’

Before he could respond, Baarda felt the soft, light gift of a kiss at the furthest edge of his lips and found that he could neither move nor speak, his transition into Dale’s last moments complete.

‘We should take a break,’ Connie said. ‘I need coffee. You want anything from room service?’

The light came on before Baarda registered that she’d moved.

‘Tea, please,’ he croaked. ‘And mineral water, still. Connie—’

She was already dialling and began talking immediately, putting in their order. Baarda got up, walked to the desk and poured himself a trickle of Balvenie whisky that he knocked back as Connie replaced the receiver to room service.

He watched her stretch, tumbling over the right words and wrong words in his mind.

‘Connie,’ he said, his voice no more than the rumble of a distant earthquake across a mountain range. ‘What was that?’

‘Role play,’ she said. ‘And you, my repressed English oak tree, were nothing short of a revelation. I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with Archie Bass’s persona.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not again. That was not …’ His voice trailed off.

‘Comfortable?’ She grinned. ‘Normal? Sane, even?’

‘I was thinking, appropriate.’ He poured a second measure of whisky.

‘Oh, I see. You’re freaking out. Come on then, ask it.’

‘It’s not a joke, Connie. We work together. It’s one thing, you being utterly unpredictable, and yes, sometimes really rather abnormal. But that was beyond the scope of, well, of anything.’

‘Ask the question, Brodie,’ she repeated softly, sitting on the edge of her bed and leaning forward, elbows on knees, chin resting on palms.

Baarda put the whisky tumbler down and folded his arms. ‘Who was it you kissed, and why?’

Connie put her hand behind her head and pulled the band out of her customary ponytail. ‘Oh, okay, you mean, was it you or was it Dale?’ She shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It certainly changes the conversation we should have.’

‘What if it’s neither? What if it was just the result of everything I’ve seen and heard today, maybe especially tonight?

Maybe it was sadness for Abnay or admiration for you, or a need to vent in a way that’s an antidote for the anger and frustration I feel.

Maybe it was a moment of human connection in the middle of three goddamned murders.

That’s a lot of maybes, Brodie. Don’t we have enough answers to find already, without you adding another one to the mix? ’

Baarda ran a tired hand through the tangle of brown curly hair that he was all too aware had recently become edged with salt. Connie made him feel both older and younger than his years, and as if he knew nothing. She was impossible.

‘There have to be boundaries,’ he said.

‘Legal ones? Is this a human resources problem?’ She laughed but the smile in her eyes was diminished, and he could have cursed himself for that.

‘Boundaries for us. Working boundaries. I know you express yourself in a way that is entirely your own. I also understand that your brain doesn’t work the same way as anyone I’ve ever met.

But me lying on a bedroom floor in the middle of the night becoming a dead man …

that’s more than just a little fucked up.

And that’s before I factor in the fact that I think you kissed the embodiment of a murdered incel because you felt sorry that he’d never been loved. ’

‘You think that’s what I did?’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Room service.’

‘You were amazing tonight,’ Connie said, standing up. ‘I know things about Abnay I hadn’t seen clearly before. And I also know some things about his murderer. Whatever happened on my floor, it was a breakthrough, not an issue.’

She went and opened the door, holding it for an exhausted-looking woman to carry a tray through.

‘That’s my cue, I think. I’ll skip the tea,’ Baarda said.

‘See you at breakfast.’ He slipped out and let himself into his own bedroom next door, painfully aware of Connie just metres away, and knowing with absolute certainty that neither of them would be getting any sleep in the few hours left before dawn.